BY NDUMBE BELL GASTON IN DOUALA
Stakeholders of the Kribi Seaport, South region, have converged to forward strategies which will boost the new seaport and facilitate trading.
A seminar was held recently ahead of the upcoming official launching of the Kribi Port operations, to formalize and harmonise standards and code of ethics on the formal and informal usage of the port and the dissemination of information and procedures for the passage of goods.
As he presided the meeting, the Minister of Transport, Massena Ngalle Bibihe, said “Cameroon’s heartbeat is now in Kribi, therefore, the government certainly has high expectations from this forum whose most concrete results will be to outline, in the most direct manner, how Cameroonians now and in the future will draw benefits and prosperity from one of the greatest infrastructural and economic achievements in recent years”.
Also, the stakeholders equally brainstormed on identifying the malfunctions and eventual obstacles of unscrupulous stakeholders whose intentions are clear to act negatively in the handling of goods, so as to put measures in place to reduce or eliminate them.
On this, Patrice Melom, Director General of Kribi Port Authority (PAK) urged “We should table the most precise plan possible for the optimal start of operations without risk of forfeiture and establish a collaborative framework for proposals and solutions generation that captures and eliminates these malfunctions in the least costly manner possible”.
The collaborative framework resulted in a number of technical recommendations of which some of them were the reduction of deadlines and transactions costs through the improvement, harmonization, and simplification of procedures within the context of coordinated management.
The Director of Commercial Operations Modeste Akoo, on his part, said the fluidity of the passage of goods is a fundamental process in the port, for it to serve as a passage point for goods from one means of transportation to another.
For the customs sector,their focus is on competitiveness through trade facilitation. The Chief of sector II, South Customs declared, “Trade facilitation can contribute to boost the competitiveness of the Cameroonian economy. In this respect the facilitation granted to economic players aim to contribute to their growth by guaranteeing them adequate support and assistance in order to enable them to better position themselves on the world market”.
Simplification measures to be put in place at Kribi will be ASYCUDA, an automated customs system that contributes to the reduction of the transit deadline for goods and dematerialization of procedures. This has developed to a new application CAMPASS in partnership with Korean Customs. This is followed by 100% scanning rate of containers landingat the port.
Trade facilitation measures like the creation in 2016 of the National committee for Trade Facilitation (CONAFE) whose office is in the Prime Minister’s Service, is responsible for implementing measures to facilitate and accelerate international trade. The customs will also secure the commercial environment with NEXUS GPS and HALCOMI.