When Africa Came to See What Nigeria Built – By O’tega Ogra
When Wamkele Mene, Secretary-General of the African Continental Free Trade Area Secretariat, arrived at the headquarters of the Nigeria Customs Service, much of what he had come to discuss was already running.
On computer screens inside the Service, customs officers were processing live declarations through B’Odogwu, Nigeria’s Unified Customs Management System. Mene was in Abuja as the Secretariat advanced a 20-year customs modernisation project valued at $3.1 billion.
At the centre of that project is Bergmans Security Consultant and Supplies Limited, a Nigerian company.
Through AfriTrade CMP Limited, one of its subsidiaries, Bergmans will implement the continental project involving the AfCFTA Secretariat and AfCFTA Holdings Limited. Another subsidiary, Trade Modernisation Project Limited, holds the concession for Nigeria’s customs modernisation programme and has worked with the Nigeria Customs Service on the systems now deployed at home.
Bergmans went into the continental assignment with something more persuasive than a proposal. Its case had already been tested in Nigerian ports, where technology has to contend with large cargo volumes, old infrastructure, several government agencies and the complications that come with moving goods through one of Africa’s largest economies.
Mene said companies from outside Africa had also approached the Secretariat for the work. The choice went to an African company, and a Nigerian one whose experience had been built under conditions considerably less forgiving than a presentation room.
Bergmans Chairman, Alhaji Saleh Ahmadu, OON, described what had been built in Nigeria as “a model for customs modernisation across Africa.” For a company now being asked to work across the continent, the Nigerian system had become both proving ground and reference point.
B’Odogwu began as a pilot at the PTML Command in Lagos in October 2024 as Nigeria moved away from legacy customs platforms and sought greater control of the systems underpinning its trade infrastructure. The wider programme includes electronic cargo tracking, surveillance, risk management, data infrastructure and non-intrusive inspection.
In March this year, the National Single Window went live, giving traders one digital point of interaction with government agencies where they once had to submit the same information repeatedly across systems that could not communicate with one another.
The costs of those inefficiencies are familiar. Every additional day a container spends at a port costs money. So does a truck waiting at a border or a consignment inspected twice because one agency cannot see what another has already done. Those expenses eventually enter the wider economy through the price of food, medicine, machinery and other goods.
Last year, the Nigeria Customs Service collected ₦7.277 trillion, about ten per cent above target. Its Comptroller-General, Bashir Adewale Adeniyi, was unanimously returned in July as Chairperson of the World Customs Organisation Council.
Members of the Senate Committee on Customs, led by its Chairman, Senator Jibrin Isah, also saw the systems after a two-day retreat on the reforms. Isah said members of his committee had become ambassadors of the Service after what they had seen.
Customs authorities across Africa operate different technologies and procedures. For the continental free trade area to work, cargo needs to remain visible as it moves along trade corridors, inspection records need to travel with consignments and border agencies need access to information generated before goods arrive, an integration problem spread across more than 50 jurisdictions.
Nigeria’s business environment is routinely criticised, often correctly, for making simple things difficult. Companies that learn to build functioning systems in those conditions can also acquire experience that travels. A customs platform able to work across Nigerian ports, cargo volumes, public institutions and infrastructure has already encountered many of the problems found elsewhere on the continent.
President Bola Tinubu, welcoming the Secretariat’s choice this week, said Nigerian institutions and businesses should help build the technology and infrastructure required for Africa’s single market. His administration has pursued a related idea through the National Talent Export Programme launched in 2023, which seeks to place Nigerian professional skills in the global economy.
Bergmans takes that ambition further. What is being exported here is the product of Nigerian expertise.
Africa will spend billions of dollars over the next decade building the systems required to make continental trade function, drawing competition from global technology and infrastructure companies with longer histories and deeper balance sheets. The AfCFTA Secretariat had those options. It came to Abuja, saw a Nigerian system running and chose the Nigerians.
_Otega ‘The Tiger’ Ogra is Senior Special Assistant to the President on Digital Engagement, Strategy and New Media._
