13 May 2017, Sweetcrude, Lagos — The Seme Area Command of the Nigeria Customs Service has taken proactive measures to eliminate all barriers that serve as impediments to effective trade facilitation contained in the ECOWAS protocol for the Lagos-Abidjan corridor.
The Customs Area Controller, Mohammed Aliyu, has collapsed some operational structures along the busy land border with a view to consolidating on the achievements of his predecessor.
He disclosed further that in order to ensure the standardization of trade facilitation and protect the territorial integrity of the country, all incoming transport vehicles with particular emphasis to luxury buses must be subjected to scanning procedure as it is done with trucks and containers.
Aliyu who occasionally monitors the modus operandi of officers under his jurisdiction by way of uninformed visit, enjoined the field officers to ensure that total compliance to the service extant laws while engaging in anti-smuggling operations.
On the issue of trapped vehicles that could not meet the dateline of the policy on the ban of vehicle importation through the land border, he charged his officers to ensure proper documents verification and authentication of duty payment of each vehicle trapped in the Customs vehicle seat before release.
He warned that smugglers must not take advantage of the exercise as the numbers of the trapped vehicles in Customs custody is known to the Command.
In a related development, the Customs Area Controller handed over two suspects, Mr. Sotoni Geopgesi and Mr. Achada Nonbe with some illicit substances to the Commander Nigeria Drug Law Enforcement Agency, NDLEA, Badagry – Lagos