By Mohamed Jaward Nyallay
Customs Officers of the National Revenue Authority have started a three-day training on the fight against illicit trade. The training which is organized by Logistics Solution Services (LSS) and its global partners, Societe General du Survaillance (SGS), is designed to strengthen knowledge within the customs department.
LSS is a local company that has been contracted by the Government of Sierra Leone to do cargo tracking at all three ports of entry in the country – airport, sea and land borders.
Currently they have started operations at the Queen Elizabeth II quay in Freetown.
Organizers of the training say it is part of their responsibility to train Customs Officers and give them the required skills they need to secure the ports better.
The training which started on Tuesday covers modules such as valuation, transfers and correct documentation.
Christophe Zimmerman, a World Customs Organization expert and a member of SGS, who will be conducting the training over the next three days told Customs Officers in the opening of the seminar that the world was getting sophisticated, and that securing ports against illicit trade was also becoming more difficult. He said the training was geared towards addressing these challenges.
“You have to become the Police of goods,” he told the trainees.
“We’ve got three pillars: logic, currency and truth. Everything is fake, invoice, certificate of origin, customs declarations, they can lie. But the transport documentations, they can’t. That is the reason why we are working with the Sierra Leone customs commissioner and we are cooperating with LSS to try to improve the level of knowledge, the level of pertinence and the best practices,” he told journalists on the sidelines of the seminar.
Deputy Commissioner of Customs, Abu Kanneh, said they welcomed the training because it would contribute to the capacity of the staff.
“We hope this kind of exercise continue, because capacity building is not a one-day thing,” Commissioner Kanneh said.
He noted that they had drawn officers from all the departments within the customs office, and so the knowledge that would be transmitted in the seminar would benefit as much officers as possible.
“We expect people to emerge as trainers and train as much people as possible when they return,” he added.
Kanneh went on to say that the government was currently losing around 30 to 40% of potential revenue to illicit trade.
Christian Ngombu, the Project Manager and Human Resource Manager at LSS, said by the end of the three days training the Queen Elizabeth II Quay and the 23 customs officers on training would be certified with FIT (Fight against Illicit Trade) certificates.
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