The Nigeria Customs Service, on Wednesday, announced that its revenue increased by 74 per cent to N4.49tn between June 2023 and May 2024, when compared to what the service collected during the same period in the previous year.
Comptroller-General of Customs, Adewale Adeniyi, announced this in Abuja while providing an account of the NCS performance over the past year under his stewardship as the helmsman of the federal revenue-generating agency.
“Exactly one year ago today, and approximately three weeks into the inauguration of President Bola Tinubu, I was appointed by Mr President as the Comptroller-General of this strategic agency, the NCS,” he stated.
Outlining some of the key milestones recorded by the service under its core statutory responsibilities, Adeniyi said, “The NCS reported a remarkable 74 per cent growth in revenue collection over the past year, recording a total revenue collection of N 4.49tn between June 2023 and May 2024, compared to the N2.58tn collected during the corresponding period of the previous year.”
This feat, according to him, was “underpinned by a sustained increase of 70.13 per cent in average monthly revenue collection compared to the previous year. NCS recorded an average monthly revenue collection of N343bn, compared to the N202bn monthly average.
“Notably, there was a substantial 122.35 per cent rise in revenue collection during the first quarter of 2024 compared to the same period in the previous year. These gains were attributed to various strategic initiatives.”
Adeniyi said the initiatives include the N15bn recovery by the Revenue Review Performance Recovery Exercise; N2.79bn recovered from the 90-day window for the regularisation of the documents of uncustomed vehicles and the N1.5bn recovered from the decongestion of 1,705 overtime containers and 981 vehicles from the port.
“It is also worthy to note that on June 13, 2024, NCS recorded a daily all-time-high of N58.5bn in revenue collection,” Adeniyi stated.
On trade facilitation, he said significant achievements were made, such as the decongestion of ports and the reopening of previously inaccessible access roads.
“Similarly, the designation of a dedicated terminal for exports has yielded significant gains, facilitating the processing of export goods through the Lilypond command.
“Initially handling 317 Single Goods Declarations in transactions, the terminal now manages 7,464 SGDs, accounting for 19.49 per cent of the total 38,294 export transactions recorded in 2023.
“By the first quarter of 2024, the service has processed a total of 10,786 transactions, with 3,162 (29.32 per cent) of these processed through the dedicated export terminal,” Adeniyi stated.