The Executive Secretary, Nigerian Shippers Council (NSC), Pius Akutah Thursday said that the Council’s dispute resolution initiative has saved the country over N6 billion.
Akutah, hinted that the Council has established a complaint handling and dispute resolution Mechanism for mitigation and other court settlement between shipping service providers and users.
Speaking in Abuja while on a courtesy visit to the National Coordination office of the African Free Continental Trade Agreement (AfFCTA), he explained the component has helped in the past few years, adding: “we have been able to save this country from losing billions of naira, over N6 billion have been saved from the initiative over disputes that have arisen.”
While reaffirming the role that trade facilitation plays in the economic growth of any nation, Akutah said NSC has taken some measures to facilitate trade and reduce some of the bottlenecks that hinder the ease of doing business in the country.
He noted: “Some of the initiatives are ongoing, like the informal trade which has to be captured for the purpose of data, we have set up some border information centers in some of the key areas where we know a lot of these trade between our country and some of the border countries take place which have not been captured in our data
“So the essence of this border information centers is to see how we can formalize these trade activities for the purpose of capturing them in our data. We have one in Lagos, we have one in Katsina, Sokoto and Cross River respectively”.
Akutah noted that these initiatives are all geared towards trade facilitation.
According to him, we have opened our borders, our trade border as a continent has been opened now, so if we just sit down and watch, we will see people come in with goods and services while we just sit down and look at them, so we have to develop all critical infrastructure, especially in the transport sector in order to be able to encourage movement of good and services.
The executive secretary stressed that Nigeria happens to be one of the countries where trade is most expensive, addi g that the cost of doing business in the port sector is very high compared to other African countries, especially those in neighbouring environment.
Akutah said m: “The bottlenecks that are there are poor infrastructure, cumbersome procedures, restrictions, high tariffs in doing business in general, all contributing to the problems that we are facing today.
“AfFCTA is a platform that is needed today to correct all of these abnormalities, and we are encouraged that the AfFCTA office in Nigeria is on the right track and we are going to see how we will work together to deal with these issues as far as it involves intra trade among African countries” he stated
Earlier, the National Coordinator of AfFCTA, Mr. Segun Awolowo highlighted the NSC role in trade facilitation apart from regulatory duties.
He wanted that trade facilitation is extremely important because that is the only way the country could really benefit even for trade agreements such as the AfFCTA
“So we must highlight the importance of ensuring that all the stakeholders are well informed about the opportunities and the requirements under the AfFCTA agreement,” he stated.