Customs’ night raid in Sango Ota

IT  would seem that the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) would not relent in scoring high in infamy. Its penchant for the absurd appears to be boundless, as its men recently raided a rice market in Sango Ota in the Ado Odo/Ota Local Government Area of Ogun State at midnight. This was at a time when the dust of its deliberate distortion of facts on the helicopters imported into the country by the Rivers State government was yet to settle in the polity. According to media reports, the men of the Service from the Federal Operation Unit (FOU), accompanied by soldiers attached to OPMESSA, invaded the market and carted away 18,000 bags of rice and 75 containers of vegetable oil estimated at several millions of naira. All this happened at midnight when the traders had left their shops and could not have presented documents to show that the importation of their goods had followed the due process.

The following day, the angry and distraught traders spilled into the Lagos-Abeokuta highway in protest, blocking the Temidire end of the road for several hours during which innocent travellers and commuters were unnecessarily delayed for the lapses committed by a professional agency of the Federal Government. In the aftermath of the raid, both the Customs Service and the traders have been making claims and counter claims about the quantity of the seized items. The claim of the NCS that it acted on a tip-off cannot suffice to justify a midnight raid in the absence of the suspected owners of the items in question. How is the NCS to be taken simply on its word that the volume of the confiscated items was just as it claimed, especially as many of the traders have alleged that those who conducted the raid even broke into safe vaults and made away with lots of money? The truth is that the NCS did not conduct the raid in a professional way. It was done without any search warrant and without credible witnesses.

For an agency that is suffering from credibility deficit, the NCS’ recent raid on the Sango Ota rice market was thoroughly unprofessional and ill-advised. It is even all the more regrettable because the present administration is living up to an unenviable reputation of arbitrariness in its various showings. A pattern of such raids has emerged: on judges and even pastors, all at night, suggesting that this administration has an uncanny affinity for an arbitrariness that does not collocate with either decency or the tenets of democracy.

The midnight raid conducted by the NCS is entirely condemnable and unjustifiable. It was in poor taste and its management must find a way to placate the aggrieved traders if litigation on their part would not bring the desired reprieve soon enough. If the NCS has to execute its mandate, it must conduct its  operations without allowing any form of blemish. Even a search warrant is always executed in the presence of the property owner, let alone a business outfit, and we are sure that many of these traders must have suffered untold damage on account of that single raid that has maimed them financially and psychologically.

Worse still, the agency has vowed to intensify such raids, giving the impression that it is callously indifferent to public opinion and decency in its operations. Such wanton disregard for the consequences of its corporate laxities has to stop before any progress can be made in the country.  We are of the opinion that the rest of the society must stand up to all forms of arbitrariness on the part of all the government agencies which exercise powers on behalf of the executive arm of the government. Until they are compelled to face the consequences of their corporate laxities, such ugly incidents in the mould of the recent raid in Sango Ota by the NCS will not cease.