‘Cargo Tracking Note will render made-in-Nigeria products uncompetitive’  

The Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN) has expressed disappointment at the reports linking the Nigerian Shippers’ Council (NSC) to the re-introduction of the Cargo Tracking Note (CTN), now christened the Advanced Cargo Tracking Note (ACTN).

The association says the ACTN implementation comes with an associated cost that will further increase the cost of doing business for manufacturers who rely mainly on imports for raw materials and machines. The group says this will automatically add to the already suffocating costs borne by manufacturers and render locally made goods uncompetitive.

The NSC recently announced the re-introduction of CTN, earlier suspended in 2013. The CTN enables cargoes on transit to be tracked from port of loading to port of destination.  It is expected that the CTN will check fraudulent declarations on goods arriving at the ports.

But MAN says the re-introduction of the CTN is an indication that NSC has ignored weighty reservations expressed by real sector players at different forums, adding that  a special meeting had been held with the management and governing board of NSC twice in August where the association expressed dissatisfaction with the proposed re-introduction of the CTN on the basis of observed limitations, negative trickle-down effect on businesses, cost-driven implications on cargo clearance and other yet- to- be-addressed lapses that motivated the call for its cancellation few years ago.

“The rationale for dissatisfaction was expressed at the afore-mentioned meetings and formally communicated in writing to the Executive Secretary of the Nigerian Shippers Council on September 15, 2015,” MAN says in a statement signed by Remi Ogunmefun, its director-general.

“ln addition, we recommended that NSC should convene a broader stakeholders’ forum that will afford all operators on the maritime value chain, especially those that would carry the cost burden of CTN, to technically X-ray its proposal to re-introduce CTN and agree on a mutually beneficial implementation guideline,” MAN adds.

The association further says that the NSC is yet to address the concerns of manufacturers or those raised by other stakeholders. Neither has it amended observed lapses, provided alternative remedies nor convened a maritime stakeholders’ forum but has resorted to the announcement of the plan in the media, the group says.

MAN says the ACTN is a re-introduction of the Cargo Tracking Note discarded by the federal government on the request of the operators within the Nigerian manufacturing sector in 2013, stating that the limitations and technical lapses that rendered the CTN unacceptable to maritime stakeholders and real sector operators that led to its previous rejection are still present in the ACTN.

It further says that all the information required, including the data the proposed ACTN intends to collate, are currently available within the Nigeria Customs Service Single Window Platform, the Standards Organisation of Nigeria, and the Nigeria Port Authority, among others, pointing out that the re-introduction of ACTN for the purpose of providing information/data already available with other government ministries, departments and agencies will amount to a mere duplication and at an enormous cost to the manufacturers, importers and other port users.

“In the interest of the manufacturing sector and the Nigerian economy, the Nigeria Shippers’ Council and by extension the federal government should jettison the re-introduction of the CTN as currently crafted until the issue of where the cost burden of its implementation will rest is discussed,” MAN says.

 

ODINAKA ANUDU

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