Arms Smuggling: Customs CG Reads Riot Act to Officers, Stakeholders
... "We will trace and catch insider collaborators"
Comptroller General of Nigeria Customs Service, Bashir Adewale Adeniyi has read the root act to customs officers over arms smuggling capable of threatening national security.
Speaking to officers in Apapa Port on Thursday, July 5, 2024, Adeniyi vowed to bring down the full weight of the law against any customs officer found to have compromised or collaborated with importers of arms and ammunition into the country.
A visibly angry CGC told the gathering that the government will not spare any importer, agent or terminal operator found to be involved.
According to him every Nigerian, including customs officers suffer the effects of arms and ammunition in wrong hands either through kidnapping, armed robbery , murder and other vices.
He reminded customs officers that the service system records digital footprints to trace any one found to have compromised even several years after they might have left the service.
According to him, some containers with prohibited items are in ports waiting to be exited but can be intercepted only if customs officers live up to their responsibility and keep to their oath of office
Before going into a closed door session with senior officers, Adeniyi said “Since the beginning of this year, I am sure you must have known or heard about a Customs Officer or his family member that was kidnapped.I am sure you must have heard or known the family of a Customs Officer that have been victims of terrorist attack either in the Northeast, Northwest or in the South.
“Custom Officers are not isolated from what is happening in the rest of the country .I just want to use those instances to draw your attention to the fact that we live in very dire situation in the country.Unfortunately, the responsibility of making it better lies in the hands of all of us.
“The responsibility of correcting this anomaly lies in our action or inaction .You are following the development of what happened yesterday at the airport with the seizure of arms and military accoutrements .Before last week, and before the one that happened yesterday, there was a similar incident that happened in Onne and they are going through our hands.
“Declarations that are made by these people will go through our desks.They are inside our systems.What it means is that we have an onerous responsibility to address the national security emergency that we face in Nigeria.
“What the trend has shown is that they are desperate, they have network of support , they are people who conspire with them, some of them within the service and some of them outside the service.We have the responsibility not to allow them to bring those devilish merchandise into Nigeria .Of course we know that they come in different forms.
“It is either they are wrongly declared,or they come to compromise our process and procedures.The most important one is the fact that goods that are supposed to be scanned or those that are supposed to undergo physical examination are not subjected to it.These goods are released and are not scanned or they are never inspected.
“The other one is when we say they are going on transire to bonded terminals and they never get there.That Custom Officer who would be the victim of kidnapping or terrorist attack or the one that might be facing this kind of problem might be you or me if we decide to abuse the oath of office that we swore to uphold.It is all up to you to .
“The bad thing for all of you is that we work with a system that has track and trace.What each of you does with our system can be tracked and traced.We can attribute them to you in the next seven years or beyond.What you do not do can also be attributed to you so in either way, we can be located and called upon to account for our action or inaction.I therefore urge you to live up to your responsibility.
“This nation is ours and revenue is important.Trade facilitation is important too.We are getting it right on those ends.We must not fail on our mandate of national security.
“There are containers of fake drugs that are waiting to come out of the port as I speak.There are containers of arms and ammunition that are there.There are containers of frozen poultry products under import provision that are there as we are speaking and we have all the risk indicators to show them to us.We have everything it takes to trace the importers to do system audit on our own and put question marks on some of them .
“The responsibility lies on all of us to live up to the oath of service and oath of allegiance to the Federal Republic of Nigeria.If anybody is caught on the wrong side of the law, if anybody is traced to these activities, if any fraudulent warehouse is traced, if any Customs agent is traced to it, we will not spare anybody” Adeniyi said
