ABUJA: In terms of the leadership, the comptroller-general of customs, Abdullahi Dikko, has been instrumental in having a vision of a modernized customs and of trade facilitation in Nigeria. The team behind him has been able to realize this vision and is now being driven by his passion to create something in the trade facilitation arena.
The second item is the team effort. This is where you see collaboration between the public and private sector. So the team in the Nigerian Customs Service (NCS), who are the domain owners, understand the process, challenges and needs of their clients. Therefore, working together with West Blue Nigeria Ltd, a technology firm, also with domain expertise in trade facilitation, brought all the elements that are needed for achieving success.
Most importantly, the third one is the approach that was adopted. Whereas, others will go for a copy and paste approach, we looked for an African issue and looked for African solutions benchmarking against international standards to achieve a solution that works for the environment we are in.
That approach was what worked for the innovation that we now see today as the Nigeria trade hub. Not only has the trade hub recently won the the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) national awards for best portal, and the Social Media in Africa best portal in Africa awards, it was also recently commended by the World Customs Organisation (WCO) and included in the WCO single window (SW) compendium as the international best practice for like-minded customs administration to emulate.
