2023-06-17 08:52:29
From June 08 to 09, 2023, a meeting of the Directors General of Customs was held in Lomé, Togo, on the Interconnected System for the Management of Goods in Transit (SIGMAT) between the Customs Administrations of Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Togo.
Representatives of ECOWAS, UNCTAD, World Bank Group, GIZ and JICA also attended the meeting. The opening ceremony was chaired by the Commissioner General of the Togolese Revenue Office (OTR), Mr. Philippe Kokou B. TCHODIE. The ECOWAS Commission was represented by Mr. Salifou TIEMTORE, Director of Customs Union and Taxation. This meeting of the Directors General was preceded by the meeting of experts from the customs administrations of Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Togo, held from June 05 to 07, 2023 still in Lomé.
On the sidelines of the meeting of experts, a meeting was held organized by the ECOWAS Commission on the development of a roadmap for the deployment of SIGMAT in the other ECOWAS Member States and which brought together the States following members: Gambia, Guinea Bissau, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone.
During their meeting, the Directors General of Customs of the nine (9) aforementioned Member States resolutely committed themselves to the full operationalization of SIGMAT, putting an end to the outmoded manual management of goods transit operations along the trade corridors of the ECOWAS space. It should be recalled that this program for the interconnection of customs computer systems is an initiative of the ECOWAS Commission, the objective of which is to make the movement of goods more fluid on the various road corridors of our regional area by eliminating multiple checkpoints. and breaks in load at State borders.
With the implementation of SIGMAT, State Customs administrations will now work in concert so that information on cargo shipments in transit once declared at an office of departure (the country of departure) and the specified route, are shared electronically simultaneously to the Customs offices en route and to the Customs office of final destination of the goods (country of arrival), all along the corridor taken.
To materialize their commitment, the Directors General of Customs signed a Memorandum of Understanding and agreed on a Framework Instruction for the use of this computer program. Under the terms of the said Memorandum of Understanding (Article 19), any other ECOWAS Member State may become a party to this Memorandum of Understanding by simple notification to the ECOWAS Commission.
At the end of their work, the Directors General of Customs, while undertaking to ensure the implementation of SIGMAT, made the following recommendations to the ECOWAS Commission: (i) put in place a mechanism for regional unique identification of economic operators, (ii) finalize the SIGMAT Procedures Manual, (iii) accelerate the implementation of the Regulation on the Community Transit Guarantee Mechanism and finally (iv) propose to the next meeting of the Piloting a mechanism for the management and sustainability of activities involved in the implementation of SIGMAT in the Member States.
Finally, the Directors General of Customs agreed to entrust the Chairmanship of the Steering Committee to Togo until the holding of the next meeting of the Committee and to hold the next meeting of the Steering Committee in Ghana in December 2023 subject to the acceptance of political authorities.
The aforementioned meetings were held within the framework of the West Africa Trade Facilitation Program (FEAO) funded by the European Union, USAID, the Federal Republic of Germany and the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
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