Is CEPS a victim of state conspiracy?

Governments have a way of dismantling or suffocating to extinction state institutions. This becomes easier if the interest of some members of the government run parallel to that of the state and the general public whose interest governments are under mandate to serve.

Like coup makers, they lie low waiting for the least excuse in the form of agitation or protests, then they spring to action, putting their diabolical and self-serving plans into practice.

Under the pretext of breathing better managerial competence into these institutions, certain policy initiatives are implemented, which ultimately, in almost all cases, bring these institutions to their knees and prepare the ground for their collapse.

Every remedial move, once it was conceived on honest and sincere grounds, adds to the woes of the institutions, leading to their sad demise.

From the ashes or debris of these state institutions will sprout a huge fortune to serve the appetite of a few politicians and their cohorts in business, while the nation and, Ghanaians, for that matter, become the losers. In frantic desperation, we resort to foreign intervention to restore what should not have collapsed in the first place, if our allegiance were to the nation and the majority of the people.

Many state institutions have gone down the drain, not because the country lacks managerial competence or dedicated people, but simply because the decisions and actions of some people, who, while exercising state authority, prefer to owe allegiance rather to themselves, instead of the state which clothed them in the authority they choose to exercise capriciously.

Upon reflection, it is possible to realise that Ghana Airways, the national carrier, would not have been transformed into the ghost that is haunting us now, if politicians had insulated it against governmental interference and allowed it to operate on strictly business lines.

In pretending to salvage it, Ghana Airways was only hastened to its premature death, only to create a fertile ground for some unscrupulous individuals with connections in high places to team up with their type from foreign lands to harvest what they had never sown.

Ghana Airways should have been alive today, not only feeding the national kitty, but proudly flying our national flag in the skies to foreign places.

A few people have made gains, but the nation has lost.

There are many other state institutions that have gone the way of Ghana Airways. Ghana Telecom, now Vodafone, is a clear example. Why should Ghana go to Malaysia for managerial competence to manage our only national telecommunication network?

Gradually, the excuse went on until now, when we are only playing host to our own company. It is an undeniable fact that behind the collapse of every state institution or enterprise, there are the invisible hands of some people who were chosen or elected in the first place to ensure that not only they survive but also thrive.

The modus operandi had always been the same. Starve them of vital resources; load the managerial team with dubious and incompetent persons whose only qualifications are loyalty and connections and leave the rest for time to provide.

One important and strategic state institution that is gradually being sapped of its energies is the Customs, Excise and Preventive Service (CEPS). CEPS is not suffering alone as an institution, but also the nation, Ghana, which it serves as a major revenue collection agency and the thousands of highly trained professional Ghanaians in its employment. Apart from collecting revenue, CEPS also provides the country with security, collects statistics and facilitates trade.

While this is happening, some politicians, for whatever reason, have turned their eyes and ears elsewhere, seeing and hearing nothing.

In 2000, the Government of Ghana decided to pursue an initiative designed to make major progress in trade facilitation and launched the Ghana Gateway Project with the intention of making Ghana the gateway to West Africa. This initiative necessitated the signing of agreements with two destination inspection companies (DICs) to do verification, classification and valuation duties, among others, on behalf of the government in 2000. They were also to manage risk profile (red, green, yellow channels) and issue final classification and valuation reports (FCVRs). These companies were increased to four in 2002. The agreements give room for CEPS takeover at the expiry of the agreements of the DICs when CEPS might have built sufficient capacity for destination inspection duties.

To facilitate this takeover, the Government of Ghana, through the Ministry of Trade and Industry, with support from United States Agency for International Development (US-AID), commissioned the drawing of a project plan for the takeover of customs classification and valuation functions by CEPS under the Customs Clearance Component of the Trade and Investment Programme for a Competitive Export Economy (TIPCEE).

The project plan, which was presented to the government in January 2008, made several recommendations which included the ultimate takeover of the core functions of classification and valuation by CEPS after December 31, 2008, when the contract of the DICs would have expired.

Further to that, all in preparing the ground for CEPS to resume its core functions, the Ministry of Finance and the Revenue Agencies Governing Board (RAGB) signed a contract with Bankswitch, IT consultants, to provide CEPS with electronic submission of all documents and a valuation database. There is to be a transition period through December, 2008, during which the Bankswitch system will be implemented.
It was envisaged that by December 2008, there would be a centrally located classification and valuation unit fully equipped and manned by CEPS. The new IT system, which has been accepted by CEPS, has several advantages. It will provide greater transparency in the entry process than is currently the case; all documents will be retained in the system for seven years, making post-entry audit much easier and the system will record all changes to entry documents, thus discouraging fraud.

Over the years, CEPS has kept to its schedule of preparing its staff, who under the agreement, were to be trained by the DICs and had met all requirements to assume full responsibility for destination on January 1, 2009. The Commissioner of CEPS himself, Mr Emmanuel Doku, stated this point clearly in October, when he announced during the inauguration of the Classification and Valuation Complex in Accra that CEPS was more than prepared to face the challenges when the time came. In short, a lot of investments and sacrifices had been made over the years to get this important national assignment going.

It, therefore, came as a big surprise, when the previous administration started some manoeuvres to keep CEPS in limbo for another long eight years. This culminated in the signing of an agreement with a new company, Ghana Customs Inspection Company Limited (GCICL) on Sunday, December 28, 2008. Incidentally, apart from being a non-working day, that was the day, the attention of most Ghanahins was focused on the final stages of the 2008 presidential election.

To add to the intrigue, the parent company of GCICL is Ghana Link Network Services Limited, a destination inspection company which ceased to operate, and which, while in operation, ran into trouble with CEPS over the alleged fraudulent use of final classification and valuation reports (FCVRs), which cost the nation revenue loss running into billions of cedis. That matter is yet to be fully settled before the signing of the new controversial agreement that gives the company bigger room to operate.

Unfortunately, the posture of some top officials at the Ministry of Trade and Industry, including the new minister, is not encouraging. There is some murmuring that after all these efforts and investments, CEPS still lacks the human and material capacity and capability to perform its core functions.

It is too early yet to risk drawing certain conclusions about conflict of interest raging in the minds of people in high places. But it will be a better option for the minister to be making a case for a state institution such as CEPS, in which the state has invested so much, rather than to be leaning towards the side of a private company, which, at best, will drain the nation of its vital revenue.

There are more battles ahead, and the choice, to some of us, if offered the opportunity, will be between the state and a few others. We will rather be in the trench on the side of the state and, for that matter, the majority of Ghanaians. We have lost a lot of state enterprises to satisfy the greed of a few, but CEPS, as a statutory body with a lot of strategic importance, must not be allowed to suffer a similar fate, just to make a few individuals, including those who proffer to be working in the national interest rich.

Written by Kofi Akordor [E-mail: [email protected]] [Blog: kofiakordor.blogspotcom