Our Initiative at Shippers Council saved N6 Billion for Nigeria – AKUTA

Oru Leonard 

The Nigerian Shippers’ Council has said that the dispute resolution initiative  saved the country over N6 billion in the past years.

Speaking in Abuja, during a courtesy visit to the National Coordinator of the African Free Continental Trade Agreement (AfFCTA), the Executive Secretary NSC, Pius Akuta stated that the Council has established a complaint handling and dispute resolution Mechanism for mitigation and other court settlement between shipping service providers and users.

“This component has helped in the past few years, we have been able to save this country from loosing billions of naira, over N6 billion have been saved from the initiative over disputes that have arisen” he said.

Reaffirming the role that trade facilitation plays in the economic growth of any nation, he 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.

“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”.

He added that “these initiatives are all geared towards trade facilitation, 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”.

“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” he said.

While Speaking, the National Coordinator of AfFCTA, Mr. Segun Awolowo highlighted the NSC role in trade facilitation apart from regulatory duties.
He harped on the need to highlight the importance of ensuring that all the stakeholders are well informed about the opportunities and the requirements under the AfFCTA agreement.

“Trade facilitation is extremely important because that is the only way we can really benefit even for trade agreements such as the AfFCTA”.

(Nigerian Times)