Keep The Performance Afloat!

Commentaire

The skies seem clearer for the Directorate General of Customs, curiously at a time analysts of the current economic and socio-political situation of the country, would have predicated the contrary.  The Boko Haram insurgency in the Far North Region, sharp drop in the price of crude oil in the world market as well as Economic Partnership Agreement, all of which would have been dangerously detrimental to customs revenue collection, do not seem to be having the toll one would have expected on what is fetched on the field, at least for the first quarter of 2017.
Harvesting over FCFA 94 billion in March 2017, up from the projected FCFA 67 billion, is to say the least, pleasantly surprising to most, if not all. The performance, rated at 137 per cent, is a sharp contrast with the not-so-good economic environment. It emerged from the internal treasury committee meeting of the customs department of April 17, 2017 that the March performance bolstered the first quarter customs revenue collection. For the first three months of the year, the Customs Department collected slightly over FCFA 179 billion, more than the FCFA 176 billion fetched at the same period in 2016, an increase of over about FCFA 2.9 billion. Stakeholders attribute the good performance to the reforms put in place by the customs administration notably improvement in the control of goods entering the country as well as the optimisation of revenue collection strategies for all royalties.
However, critics see in the performance a probability of deliberate under-estimation of the potentials in customs revenue collection, judging from past records wherein beyond-expectation results, are almost always recorded.  Whatever the case, the current records augur well for the State th...