INTERVIEW: How We Managed Revenue Collection During Protest- Olomu, Apapa Port Customs Controller
In this short interview, Comptroller Babatunde Olomu, Customs Area Controller of Apapa Port told Ismail Aniemu how he ensured nonstoppage of revenue collection and trade facilitation at West Africa’s largest port complex in Lagos.
Olomu, who held a confidence building meeting with stakeholders ahead of the protests, said the command is meeting it’s daily revenue target despite the odds
Excerpts:
Q:Is the revenue you have collected so far as a result of what the management of Nigeria Customs Service has put on ground to make sure that these things are corrected?
Yes, the revenue collection is indicative of the structures that had been put in place by the CGC, Bashir Adewale Adeniyi just as I mentioned earlier.He has ensured that we are always on our toes because Apapa is a premier port and we also ensure that we comply fully and block all avenues for leakages.If I may stress, for the period of July last year, the total number of declarations we had was 30,284 and for July this year the total number of declarations was 27,308.We can see a gap of 3,000 declarations and if with less declarations we are able to collect more ,it shows that a lot has been brought to bear on the manner in which the revenues were collected most of which I attribute to the CGC and his management team.
Q:Overtime, there has been a talk about traders not being compliant but from your judgement, you have been able to say to yourself that you now have more compliant traders . How do we reconcile this?
There are three pillars on which we will like to rest on and the first is leveraging on the stakeholders engagement.I must confess that this has helped significantly towards the results we are showcasing today.
Without any fear of contradiction, I must say that the compliance level has significantly improved overtime.It is a process and we will keep refining it and getting it better .To a large extent, we have a very high number of compliance of stakeholders here and we are working on improving on what we have on ground.
Q:The talk of the town has been the nationwide protest and I don’t know the impact it has had on your operation. Tell us how it has impacted the revenue during the first week of the protest.
When we compute what we generate monthly, yearly and averagely, I can say that we are expected to have something in the range of N9b daily.To a large extent, for last week when the protest started ,on Thursday, we had less than N2b .However, it improved on Friday.We had over N9b.On Monday, things picked up.We had about N12.5b and on Tuesday we had over N11b.
We are still meeting up with our daily revenue target but when the protest started on Thursday, it impacted the revenue negatively. That is not to say we didn’t collect anything.We had slightly less than N2b but by Friday, it increased .
I will say that gradually, the stakeholders and clearing agents are coming back and they are more confident that all is well.We need peace and tranquility to collect this revenue.
In July 2024, the command generated the sum of N201,853,406,964.61.This is the highest monthly collection in the history of the command.
I am optimistic about the possibility of beating this record as we look forward to surpassing it in months to come.
For the frst seven months of 2024, that is January to July this year, the Apapa Area Command generated a total of N1,227,431,323,016.24.
What has been generated so far for seven months is above the total collected revenue by the command in 2023 which was N1,172,414,793,960.32.In clear terms, our 2024 seven months collection is above last year’s twelve months total collection. Worthy of note is the interventions from the Tariff and Trade Department which has contributed immensely to the successes achieved thus far.
Our compliance desk, dispute resolution team, Valuation, PCA, CIU and other units aimed at promoting seamless trade have been reinvigorated with daily,weekly and monthly evaluation by my office to oversee the progress we are making. We are committed to doing more in line with the directives and motivating examples of the Comptroller General of Customs, Bashir Adewale Adeniyi, MFR dsm psc (+).
