The Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) has successfully generated N120 billion revenue in four months using its new indigenous platform, B’Odogwu.
The service generated this through the Port and Terminal Multiservices Limited (PTML) Command of the service despite an initial attempt by Webb Fontaine, the previous service provider, to sabotage the operation.
Recall that the Comptroller General of the service, Adewale Adeniyi, on October 25th, 2024 launched the pilot phase of B’Odogwu at the PTML command.
According to the Customs Area Controller of the PTML command, Tenny Daniya, Webb Fontaine shut down its infrastructure at the PTML to frustrate the pilot scheme of B’Odogwu.
However, the Customs Service braved the odds and surmounted the teething problems, realising revenue in excess of N120 billion from 16,000 entries that were fully paid for.
Also speaking, the Comptroller General of Customs, Adewale Adeniyi who led his management team to demonstrate the efficiency of the new platform at the Apapa command, explained that the server driving B’Odogwu is more modern, compact, and efficient than the discarded NICIS.
Adeniyi also disclosed that the service has a contingency plan to deal with glitches and that the system will be driven by Main One, an indigenous connectivity system.
“We all need to understand how we came up with a new concept that is inward-looking, that is indigenous, that reflects our aspiration to put at our border a very, very robust system. Robust as B’Odogwu.
“Resilient as B’Odogwu, powerful as B’Odogwu, so that has the resilience that can handle the complexity and the volume of international trade.
“The B stands for border which represents anything that you process within the Nigerian border and then you have Odogwu.
I don’t want us to see it as an English acronym rather, it is Africa, it is Nigeria.
Now, when you launch a project of this magnitude, we are not deceiving ourselves, thinking that this is going to be a walk in the park. When we launched it at PTML, a relatively smaller formation, we experienced a number of glitches, and they are not surprising and as we experienced those glitches, we had a very, very strong and helpful implementation team that was on hand to address some of these challenges.
“Are we finished? Are we done with those challenges? I would say yes, I would say no because there are some of them that we have been able to address also there are some that we are still carrying over to this place.
“Are we going to wait until we completely finish addressing those issues before we deploy? We felt that the timeline that we have is very tight. So we can begin the development and deployment of these systems in other places and along the line, we will also be addressing the challenges that they raise,” he stated.
“With your cooperation, with your support, with your understanding, we will, together, address all those challenges. I need to recall that some times in 2013-2014. We walked this same route together.
“This is not the first time we are experiencing this kind of glitches where we are transitioning from one system to the other. When this same service provider decided to stall the implementation of PAAR in 2013, these were the kind of problems that we had. But we stood together.
“In this case, we are going to confront those challenges together and two, three months after, all the backlog that they used to create glitches into our system, we were able to surmount them. We were able to uproot all of them into a new system that was also developed by Nigerian officers in conjunction with some partners at that time,” he ended.
