By Okey Maduforo
Correspondent, Awka

President of the association, Chief Earnest Elochukwu, who spoke with reporters in Awka on Wednesday, said the main thrust of the reform is to ensure that operations in the area gets quicker, easier and better, but regretted that it has been an abysmal failure.

Elochukwu noted that the customs reform had removed the long room and replaced it with Consume Processing Centre (CPC), but said that it merely worsened the state of affairs.

“Again there has been moves towards computerization but the paradoxical thing is that even the verge of this extensive computerization, a lot of manual actions still go on along side the computerization and manual actions actually end up causing a whole lot of waste of time. Above all there are duplication of actions by agents and one can really say that there is not much progress in the reform,” he said.

Speaking on the high cost of custom licence, he sued for government’s action that will seek to regulate the practice by ensuring that certain standards are religiously kept, adding that the emphasis on money or increase and renewal has only made it that only the rich could afford to procure it.

“The belief that the amount of fees or the enormity of it would control the number of those in business is not the deferent government has to set up a standard that must be followed in operation and this could be achieved through government executive action that will now seek to regulate the practice by ensuring that certain standards are kept and also the passage of the bill on the operations”, he said.