NCS, Benin Customs plan seamless cross-border trade

The Comptroller-General of the Nigeria Customs Service, Adewale Adeniyi, has called for inter-border cooperation among trade regulatory agencies between Nigeria and the Republic of Benin to boost trade facilitation.

Adeniyi disclosed this at the Seme-Krake Border while speaking during a Joint Nigeria-Benin Republic One Stop Border Post Assessment.

He argued that if traders from different parts of the world can trust each other enough to send payment for goods before the goods are shipped, regulatory agencies should also know to harmonise their operations to ensure seamless trade facilitation.

“Sometimes these days, when you place an order to buy something from Accra, you don’t even know who is selling; you’ve never met him and then along the line, there is some kind of, you know, confidence that you develop in yourself and you send money across, and then it’s said it looks across.

So, if traders can trust themselves, then those of us that have regulated the trade should be able to trust, focus and trust in ourselves,” he said.

He added that there are technologies already in place that will make it impossible for language or currency to be a barrier in trade facilitation between the two countries.

“So that even when the trader is speaking French, when the trader from Benin is speaking French and the trader from Nigeria is speaking English, or when the trader from Nigeria is bringing Naira and the trader from Zimbabwe is bringing cefa, the system that we have will interconnect the two of them, and it will make trading very seamless. This is the first step that we believe is important in the integration of our economies,” Adeniyi added.

He pointed out that with the right strategies in place, the two countries could start harmonising their prohibition lists.

“If we get this simple system right, if we get the connectivity of our system right, we can build every other thing on top of it. We can begin to harmonise our prohibition list. We cannot begin to tell the Republic of Benin that what is dangerous to us must be dangerous to you.

“What is dangerous to you will be dangerous to us. Once technology leads, it will help us to simplify the process, and then it will make implementation easy. There is still no seamless real-time exchange of declarations, manifests, transit information, risk profiles or enforcement alerts between us. In plain terms, and at the heart of my remarks is the fact that, without interconnectivity, this is not a joint border post,” he stressed.

The NCS boss highlighted that the service comes with a specific offer of closing the systems gap, adding that work is under way on the interconnection of the two administrations through a common data exchange arrangement, building on the regional transit experience “we have both gained, so that a declaration lodged on one side is visible on the other in real time, so that transit can be tracked from origin to destination, and so that a risk profile or an enforcement alert raised by one administration reaches the other while it is still useful.”

Adeniyi reiterated that the joint assessment has identified that the scanning capability requires restoration, so that examination rests on images rather than on opening every crate.

He mentioned that access control, surveillance and lighting require strengthening, arguing that there is a need for a standing Nigeria–Benin enforcement and intelligence mechanism for coordinated patrols and rapid response.

The CGC reiterated the need for harmonised bilingual standard operating procedures covering cargo, passengers, inspection, transit and incident escalation.

“We need joint risk management, so that resources concentrate on high-risk consignments instead of falling on everything equally. We need a properly empowered joint management structure for shared infrastructure and a preventive maintenance framework with named responsibilities and funding attached. And we need order in the yard, dedicated lanes, holding areas, signage and a regulated market space,” he said.

“What we seek to achieve here is that Sèmè–Kraké be treated as a strategic border modernisation programme, and not as a series of isolated repairs. The objective is to achieve a model technology-enabled Joint Border Post, built on Customs interconnectivity, joint risk management, coordinated enforcement, secure infrastructure, harmonised procedures and accountable joint governance. If we achieve that here, we will have built the template for every other crossing in this Community,” he said.

Earlier, the Director General of Customs Administration of the Republic, Col. Raouf Malehossou Aboudou, restated his country’s commitment to boost ease of doing business at the borders.