On Monday, a girl who was billed to wed on Saturday returned from UK aboard British Airways flight. After going through Immigration checks, she went to the carousel to pick her luggage. As she was exiting from arrivals, she was stopped by a Nigerian Customs Service officer who directed her to open her luggage. She complied. After they searched her luggage and did not find anything incriminating, they picked her wedding gown and said it was contraband; therefore she had to pay N30, 000 tax for it. She protested and said that it was her personal effect; that she did not buy it for sale and there was only one wedding gown in her luggage. They insisted she must pay.
She then called her brother who was waiting for her outside the airport to pick her home. He called another Customs official at the airport, who advised her to give “something” to the official that insisted she must pay tax. After she gave them “something”, she was allowed to go with the “contraband”, wedding gown.
A worker with ground handling company at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport, Lagos told THISDAY that the target of every Customs official who comes to work at that arrivals area every day is to go home with at least $1000.
Sometimes they come short of their target; sometimes they exceed their target.
THISDAY observed that the most lucrative period is during the arrival of Emirates and Ethiopian Airlines flights when traders from China and Dubai check out their goods from the carousel. The alert Customs officials would be as busy as ever. Their hawkish eyes tell them the passengers that will “sing” and the luggage that has indicting content. And most often they are right; experience counts.
In order to ensure that every passenger with potential possibility to “drop” is gathered in, the Customs also engages the trolley service providers, who meet and negotiate with the passenger with heavily laden luggage.
The ground handling company worker explained: “The trolley man will negotiate how much he will pay so that his luggage will not be searched by Customs officials. Whatever they agree on will be related to the Customs people and the money is in dollars. But if the passenger refuses “to play ball”, the Customs officials will stop him, open the passenger’s luggage and search everything. This will waste his time and at the end of the day and in the process, they will see things they will label contraband or banned material he must not take into the country.
“They will seize those things and he will be forced to pay for them. Whatever he will pay, will be more than five times what he was initially asked to pay. And this time they will approach you officially and ask you to go to the bank and pay with receipts and bring back your teller. By the time they finish with you, you will spend two to three hours in that process. So those who are familiar with the game usually negotiate and pay,” the worker told THISDAY.
Last year, a group of businessmen and women who trade in ECOWAS countries protested collectively when they were asked to pay for the goods they bought from Senegal and other West African countries. They protested that part of the ECOWAS principles is free market among member nations, but the Customs officials insisted that the Nigerian businessmen go there to buy goods imported into those countries therefore they must pay taxes on them. At the end of the day the businessmen were forced to negotiate.
An official of the Federal Airports Authority of Nigerian (FAAN) at the international wing of the Lagos airport told THISDAY that the major problem with Nigerian rules and regulations is that they can be made arbitrary by those who are meant to enforce them like the Nigerian Police Force, the Nigerian Customs Service, the Nigerian Immigration Service and others. These rules are twisted to serve personal interests. So it will be difficult to put a check on this because when people complain and send their complaint through the proper channels, it is still those indicted that are called to explain what happened and naturally, they usually exonerate themselves.
“We see this extortion take place every day but there is nothing we can do. Those officers at their offices are complicities, so who are you to complain to? Sometimes I pity the passengers who are being ripped off every day. There was a time we said we will install cameras everywhere but the problem is not really the installation of cameras. Who monitors the cameras and these people are very hostile. We provide the operational facilities but we don’t to have control over anybody. Every paramilitary personnel at this airport should be answerable to the Chief Security Officer of FAAN, but they don’t seem to recognise that,” the FAAN official said.
Many Nigerians know their rights but there are so some who do not. The problem is that those that know, when they insist the right thing be done they are overruled or are told things have changed and the enforcers would insist on the imagined new change, just to get what they want. It is only when they know the person concerned has access to higher authorities and could report them that they concede and do the right thing.
So even in this new political atmosphere of change the excesses at the airports may escape the gale of change that is sweeping through the country.
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