Customs seek legislative overhaul of waivers, Customs Act provisions

The Nigeria Customs Service has pushed for a comprehensive legislative review of Nigeria’s import waiver and concession regime, urging the National Assembly to examine whether the incentives continue to justify their fiscal cost and support the economic objectives for which they were established.

The Comptroller-General of Customs, Bashir Adeniyi, also urged the legislative arm to commence a review of the Nigeria Customs Service Act 2023, saying three years of implementation had exposed provisions that may require refinement to keep pace with the country’s rapidly evolving trade environment.

Adeniyi made the appeal on Wednesday in Abuja during a two-day retreat organised for the Senate Committee on Customs with the theme, “Legislative Oversight in the Context of Nigeria Customs Service Modernisation and Reforms.”

Rather than focusing solely on the Service’s record-breaking revenue performance, the Customs boss challenged lawmakers to shift legislative oversight from individual cargo clearances to the design of the digital systems driving customs operations.

He argued that the next phase of oversight should interrogate automated risk management, valuation databases, cargo release timelines and the effectiveness of tax exemptions instead of isolated operational decisions.

Speaking on the waiver regime, Adeniyi said a significant volume of imports enters the country under government-approved concessions, the continued relevance of which warrants legislative attention.

He said, “Third, engage us on the exemption regime. A substantial volume of trade enters this country under waivers and concessions granted for policy reasons. Whether those concessions still serve the purposes for which they were created is a legislative question rather than a Customs one, and we would welcome your attention to it.”

The latest call comes weeks after Adeniyi raised fresh concerns over the growing scale of import duty waivers, revealing that exemptions granted by the Federal Government had reached unprecedented levels.

Last month, during an investigative hearing of the Senate Committee on Finance with revenue-generating agencies, the Customs boss disclosed that the value of Import Duty Exemption Certificate approvals granted by the Federal Government on selected imported goods and equipment rose to N34tn in 2025.

“IDEC approvals reached about N34tn in 2025, 60 per cent of which was rightly granted by the government for military hardware procurement, which attracted duty exemptions because of Nigeria’s prevailing security challenges,” he said during the meeting.

The Customs chief also urged the lawmakers to undertake a post-implementation review of the Nigeria Customs Service Act 2023, describing the legislation as the legal foundation that made the agency’s ongoing reforms possible.

According to him, three years of implementation have generated sufficient evidence for Parliament to determine which provisions are functioning effectively and which require amendment.

He said, “The Act has now been in operation for three years. A statute of that age is no longer a proposition; it is a record. There is now evidence of which provisions have worked as intended, which have proved harder to apply than the drafting anticipated, and which the pace of trade has already begun to overtake.

“A legislature rarely gets to see its own statute at work from the inside. Over these two days you will. I would ask you to treat this retreat as an occasion for reviewing the Act as much as for reviewing the Service, to ask our resource persons not only what we have built, but whether the law you gave us is proving adequate to what we are now being asked to do. Where it is not, we would rather you heard it here than discovered it in three years.”

Adeniyi maintained that Customs modernisation was fundamentally about replacing human discretion with transparent, technology-driven systems capable of producing consistent decisions regardless of the officer handling a transaction.

He explained that the deployment of the indigenous B’Odogwu customs platform and the Trade Modernisation Project represented more than a software upgrade, describing them as reforms designed to eliminate manual processes and improve accountability.

He said, “We mean the replacement of discretion with rules. Every point at which an officer exercises personal judgement over a consignment is a point at which the outcome depends on that officer, on his training, his workload, his integrity and his mood on the day. Modernisation is the systematic reduction of those points and their replacement with risk rules, automated valuation references and data-driven targeting that produce the same answer regardless of who is at the desk.

“That is why the Trade Modernisation Project matters, and why the deployment of B’Odogwu is more than a change of software. A customs administration that runs on paper is an administration in which the file can be found or lost, moved forward or held back. An administration that runs on a single electronic record is one in which every decision leaves a trace, every delay has an owner, and every intervention can be reconstructed after the fact.”