MARGARET CHIDERA
The House of Representatives has directed the Federal Government to withhold the payment of 40% balance to Webb Fontaine, a service provider to the Nigerian Custom Service (NCS), over poor performance, pending conclusion of its investigation into its activities.
The Webb Fontaine Group is a customer service provider involved in the electronic processing of trade transactions with NCS to minimise disruption of e-services, increase service levels, reduce support costs and time per incident and increase end-user satisfaction and productivity.
The House had in November, mandated its committee on customs and excise to invite Zainab Ahmed, the minister of finance, Zainab Ahmed, Godwin Emefiele, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) governor to appear for investigation of the company’s activities from from 2006 to date.
The House Committee on Customs and Excise, chaired by Leke Abejide from Kogi State, made the decision, asking the federal government to withhold the balance owed the company at an investigative hearing on Thursday.
Leke, in his ruling, said the Committee will engage an expert in forensics to look at the activities of Webb Fontaine from inception to date, vis-a-vis the payment receipts to date to determine government and individual losses.
He said the committee will also look at all the downtime (shutdowns) that have happened from inception to date and where the Webb Fontaine is going to pay compensation.
The lawmaker said all the findings and recommendations are going to be in the committee’s report so that “whoever is taking over from you will know that Nigerians can not be taking for granted.
“From what I heard, the services expected from them have not been delivered the way it was expected. They will be rounding up this year and 60% has been paid to them so the balance has to be withheld until we are done with this investigation.
“Because the service that you didn’t provide you are being paid for it, you are supposed to reject the money and then take it back to government. We will look at the revenue lost to government and what our people have suffered so that we will see how you can compensate them.”
Leke earlier said the committee’s assignment was to investigate the lost of revenue that has gone to Webb Fontaine in the course of discharging their services to the nation for the period they have been operating in Nigeria.
He said there was need for all critical stakeholders, including the company to cooperate with the parliament to execute its assignment in the four weeks allotted, stressing that CBN must appear at the next sitting of the committee.
“Why we call these critical stakeholders meeting before the investigation starts is because there was agreements signed, the Service Level Agreement (SLA) which I believe is with the minister of finance and I believe you are here you will be able to tell us.
“This thing came when we went on oversight to some zones of Nigerian Customs Service. Everywhere we went to there was complain. Just last week and this week, it takes you more than a week to be able to exit even first of all release from Customs system.
“Sometimes when you release from Customs system you can not exit the system collapse again and this have being on and on. We want to see the service level agreement; how you are paying them, taking into account all these downtime.
“Nigeria needs money when we are taking about $250 million which we need to recover to the coffers of the federal government,” he added.
The minister of finance, Ahmed who was represented by Ali Mohammed, the director of home finance in the ministry said the Nigerian Customs Service will take over operations carried out by the company on January 1, 2023 as contract ends December 31, 2022.
Mohammed told lawmakers that the ministry paid Webb Fontaine about 60% of the contract that was signed with the company, saying the ministry was discouraged from making payments due to the complaints against the service provider.
He said: “The essence of this contract is to simplify the rate at which our stakeholders; the difficulties they have often face and also increase the revenue drive for the federal government, whatever the Customs are able to realise, we take it to the federation to share amongst the three tiers of government.
“We receive often times a lot of challenges pertaining to these two critical mandates that the ministry was saddled with. One, revenue drive and the issue of ease of doing business in the society where stakeholders; the clearing agents, the people with goods and services from our various ports they can spend less time in clearing their goods from the ports instead of taking a longer time.
“I can say to some extent because other agencies are there; the Customs and the Central Bank of Nigeria when they turn up the services have not been realised and this promoted the minister of finance to also inaugurate a transition committee to ensure that after series of delays that we have experienced, now the handing over date through instrument of the steering committee was December 31, 2022.
“Meaning the Customs will take over the sort of activities that we have now delegated to Webb Fontaine based on the contract they have signed. So many agreements have been signed and evaluation of the contract has taken place, no objections have been provided by the umpire and today we have few days to the handing over still we are having the same problems we have had before.”
In his presentation, Kingsley Egwuh, Comptroller ICT, Customs acknowledged that the company’s performance was not satisfactory and the Service is adequately prepared to take over the operations, though training received were not adequate.
“The services can not be better put; the downtime, have been very bad and we want to let the Honourable House know that even three days ago we had a meeting in the federal ministry of finance about this downtime which I actually brought up, the downtime is disturbing services.
“A lot of Comptrollers complain about downtime in services. The services have been very poor, that is the the truth (it affects revenue of the Customs). One of the major submission we took to federal ministry of finance is that the Nigerian Customs Service should take ownership and operations of the existing applications and equipment from Webb Fontaine which we have not done,” he said.
On his part Opeyemi Babalola, the managing director of Webb Fontaine accepted that there have been service challenges but are swiftly tackled, alluding that trade has increased exponentially from what was obtained at the beginning of the contract in 2006.
“We can’t deny that there have been issues at times but each of these instances whenever we get those we do investigate. At every site we have site support engineers who are supposed to be the first call when there is any issues with the network or system or anything at all with the Webb Fontaine and those issues usually, should be able to resolve by whoever is on ground and in each instance, we would investigate those and attend to them.
“The report of several days of downtime and so forth, quite frankly we have found them strange because that has not been in our experience. When these issues are happening, it may be network failure, service failure depending on who is reporting them.
“We have recognise the complaints and we believe that most of those if not all of those issues end up being resolved as quickly as possible. We operate with the same mobile network like everybody else in the country and because of that, we continually renew and revise the service that we use. We recently changed some of our network service providers because we were not satisfied with the service that we were getting,” he said.
