The search for contraband goods by men and officers of the Nigeria Customs Service has taken a dramatic turn, as some villages suspected to have served as rendezvous for smugglers are now their primary targets.
In the last three weeks, over 10 villages and towns in the Sango, Ota and Badagry axis have been methodically combed by hundreds of officers, who routinely broke into suspected warehouses/shops, looking for those goods categorised as contrabands.
The renewed efforts by the officers to comb those villages and towns were not unconnected with bashings the Customs operatives have lately been receiving from their superiors, who accused them of not doing enough to stem the tide of smuggling, resulting in the loss of revenue estimated at over N1 billion.
Some of the village markets known to have been overrun by the invading Customs’ officers include, Agbara, Lusada, Atan, Oja-Odan, Ifo, Ibereko ,Ajara, Sango-Ota and such other similar places known to have served as distribution centres for smuggled goods. Checks revealed that the usually armed officers would be seen moving in convoys at breath-taking speeds, as they head towards their targets.
The Point noted that the officers usually made away with items such as vegetable oil in kegs and bags of rice, running into several millions of naira, which they routinely took to their central warehouse at the Federal Operations Unit, Ikeja.
One curious aspect of the exercise is that the breaking in into shops/ warehouses is done in the dead of the night, when their owners would have retired home after the day’s business, only to discover the next morning that their shops/warehouses had been broken into by unknown persons.
“How could they have carried out such a raid on our shops in the dead of the night? It takes a clumsy mind to invade another’s home at such a time,” Mr. Cletus Iroegu, a victim, angrily told our correspondent at Ifo.
Further investigations revealed that three of such incidents were reported to the police at Sango two weeks ago. The police initially thought that the breakin was the handiwork of burglars, but had a change of mind when preliminary investigations pointed to the fact that it was carried out by some Customs officers, who were “making night seizures by tearing down shops, using the powers of ingress as allowed by the law.”
According to Madam Esther Idowu, who has her shop beside the road at Oju-Oore, Market in Sango, “I had just five bags of rice, which I bought from different customers. I am not a smuggler.
Obviously, the bags of rice must have passed through the border posts. The question is where were they (Customs men) when the goods were being brought into this country? Now, I came back to my shop only to find it empty.
“On enquiry, I was only told that those Customs officers, who broke down my shop and made away with my goods, only came in the night. They did not leave any trace, if at all, something could still be done to get back my goods.” However, several attempts made to speak with the spokesperson of the Nigeria Customs Service, Mr. Wale Adeniyi, proved abortive as his telephone line was switched-off.
