Customs rakes in N120b revenue in 4 months, eyes greater performance
By Jeph Ajobaju, Chief Copy Editor
Up to N120 billion revenue has been generated by the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) in the past four months in the trial phase of its new indigenous platform, B’Odogwu.
The haul came through the Port and Terminal Multiservices Limited (PTML) Command despite an initial alleged attempt by Webb Fontaine, the previous service provider, to sabotage the operation.
NCS Comptroller General Adewale Adeniyi on 25 October 2024 launched the pilot phase of B’Odogwu at the PTML Command where NCS Customs Area Controller Tenny Daniya alleged that Webb Fontaine shut down its infrastructure to frustrate the pivot.
However, Adeniyi stressed, the NCS has braved the odds and surmounted the teething problems to realise N120 billion revenue from 16,000 entries fully paid for.
Adeniyi – who led his management team to demonstrate the efficiency of the new platform at the Apapa Command – explained that the server driving B’Odogwu is more modern, compact, and efficient than the discarded NICIS, per Leadership.
He disclosed that the NCS has a contingency plan to deal with glitches and that the system will be driven by Main One, an indigenous connectivity system.
Said he: “We all need to understand how we came up with a new concept that is inward-looking, that is indigenous, that reflects our aspiration to put at our border a very, very robust system.
“Robust as B’Odogwu. Resilient as B’Odogwu, powerful as B’Odogwu that has the resilience that can handle the complexity and the volume of international trade.
“The B stands for border which represents anything that you process within the Nigerian border and then you have Odogwu. I don’t want us to see it as an English acronym, rather it is African, it is Nigerian.
“Now, when you launch a project of this magnitude, we are not deceiving ourselves, thinking that this is going to be a walk in the park.
“When we launched it at PTML, a relatively smaller formation, we experienced a number of glitches, and they are not surprising and as we experienced those glitches, we had a very, very strong and helpful implementation team that was on hand to address some of these challenges.
“Are we finished? Are we done with those challenges? I would say yes, I would say no because there are some of them that we have been able to address also there are some that we are still carrying over to this place.
“Are we going to wait until we completely finish addressing those issues before we deploy? We felt that the timeline that we have is very tight. So we can begin the development and deployment of these systems in other places and along the line, we will also be addressing the challenges that they raise.
“With your cooperation, with your support, with your understanding, we will, together, address all those challenges. I need to recall that some times in 2013-2014 we walked this same route together.
“This is not the first time that we are experiencing this kind of glitches where we are transitioning from one system to another. When this same service provider decided to stall the implementation of PAAR in 2013, these were the kind of problems that we had. But we stood together.
“In this case, we are going to confront those challenges together. And two, three months after, [we will look back and realise that] all the backlog that they used to create glitches in our system, we were able to surmount them.
“We were able to uproot all of them into a new system that was also developed by Nigerian officers in conjunction with some partners at that time.”
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