The Nigerian Senate has commenced action on the Postal Service (Repeal and Reenactment) Bill for 2021, which restricts Nigerian postal services to only postal operations in the country.
Brand Spur Nigeria reports that the bill also aims to Unbundle the Nigerian postal service(NIPOST) and also position Nipost as a standard postal service while alienating existing private courier and logistics companies.
Here are 5 reasons the bill should not be allowed to be implemented in Nigeria:
- The bill seems to make existing logistics licenses invalid while making it compulsory for existing companies to start the application process afresh and what this means is that they get to dictate who gets the new license first and who doesn’t, thereby disturbing the current flow of operations.
- The bill also requires that 2% of annual turnover from the logistics is expected to be paid to the regulatory part of NIPOST expected to stand alone. What this means is that for big logistics companies like DHL, they get to remit 1.3 billion naira annually whether they make profit or not. An annual turnover policy is at the detriment of existing logistics companies and can be seen as an antic to slowly kill these logistics businesses.
- Also, the implementation of these bills would not only slowly kill companies but the implications would include job loss for several Nigerians who have given their all to help build these logistics and courier companies. As we all know that in a society where people struggle to get jobs, imagine an increase in unemployment rate thanks to poor analysis of a policy meant to help provide value to people while generating revenue to the government.
- The Bill also gives room for a monopoly to exist in an industry that should operate on the principles of the free-market economy where the advantages are many but the bill seems to be set up to help NIPOST gain monopoly of a certain kilogramme of parcels, documents, and valuable items, this exclusivity is dangerous as consumers would have to depend on one organization to deliver and receive what is theirs and one of the disadvantages this would cause is service delivery delay and this was what killed Nipost in the first place as it engendered poor service delivery.
- Another disadvantage is that lack of competition increases the lack of growth in the logistics industry to deliver exceptional services that would be of value to the consumers as there would be no competition to challenge the stagnant market.
- The Nigerian lawmakers and the government, in general, are known to always cite world best practices even though it is probably emulating and using practices that support their agenda when crafting bills. It is an improper and inadequate analysis when a policy is being crafted just based on best practices, the question is have the best practices been interrogated to understand why they are working for other countries, and have they considered the implications of having a similar structure adopted by Nigeria. A half-baked or non-analysis is going to cause many unseen problems. If the foundation of the postal reform bill is based on just best practices without consideration on how that policy was designed to work in other countries, what issues these countries encountered, what structures these countries put in place and how all these translate into workable systems then the policy is bound to fail and instead cause problems.
The above reasons are why these reform bill should be reviewed and analyzed from the stakeholders’ and consumers’ point of view, without these considerations the bill would probably not just destroy the existing structure but set Nigeria back to old times when Nigerians solely used the NIPOST and Nitel. People seek progressive policies and not the ones that would set them back.
