Nigeria Customs Service officials have been accused by Afam Nnaji, the founder and Chairman of the Board of the Nnaji Family Foundation of extorting millions of naira from them in order to import basketball equipment into Nigeria. Nnaji’s son, Zeke, plays for the Denver Nuggets in the NBA.
The younger Nnaji’s motivation to give back to the community in which his dad grew up in southeast Nigeria, was the motivation behind setting up the Nnaji Family Foundation. The foundation is registered as a non-profit with the Corporate Affairs Commission Nigeria, the ministry of finance and the ministry of budget and economic planning.
The foundation has built a facility in Agbani, near Enugu, where they coach kids on basketball and teach science and technology. They also undertake other humanitarian works like spending about 15m naira each year feeding children that visit their facility and providing food supplies to the community around their facility every quarter.
Once their charity status was approved by the relevant statutory authorities in Nigeria, they were advised to inform the finance ministry whenever they were importing equipment into the country.
They did as advised but when their container of donated exercise equipment arrived in Lagos, the finance ministry claimed that the online system was “inoperable” so they couldn’t be issued with the required number. Without this number, the foundation decided to pay to for the release of the container to avoid further demurrage costs.
Their clearing agent said this would costs 4.3m naira, but they ended up paying well over 12m naira. Nnaji alleged that Ngozi Okwara, the Public Relations Officer for Tincan Island Area Command, Lagos shook them down for 3.5m naira that was paid into a “take down” account belonging to a certain Ugwu Charles Agbo. Other sections of the service took turns in taking money off the foundation – Customs Intelligence Unit took 500,000 naira and Federal Operations Unit Zone C took another 500,000 naira.
Nnaji shared with Naijiant.com payment receipts and WhatsApp exchanges with the extortionists including this one:
He revealed plans to start litigation to “get our money back from all these corrupt individuals, who are basically stealing funds meant for public good”.
He added: “It is deplorable that a government agency like the Customs Service will be responsible for extorting money from a non-profit organisation trying to help improve living conditions in our community. What these few bad apples are doing is impacting negatively on the GDP of our nation and they invariably are also reaping the reward of their evil. Transparency is a huge disinfectant to corruption; until we have a transparent process across all agencies nothing will change.”
