Forfeited, abandoned assets worth N4 trillion wasting, say auctioneers

• Urge FG to engage local practitioners to avoid further wastage

The Nigeria Association of Auctioneers (NAA) has revealed that there are no fewer than N4 trillion worth of assets in Nigeria. These they said includes both forfieted and abandoned properties wasting across the country.NAA President, Aliyu Kiliya disclosed this while speaking at the 20th Annual General Meeting of the association in Abuja,

According to Kiliya “Once all these items are centralised to the Ministry of Justice, they can reach up to that amount”, he said. The President continued: “My concern is for government to dispose the assets on time so that there will be no more wastage because the more they stay, there will be depreciation, there will be technical deformity and the items will lose their value as a result of delay in taking action.

On the need for government to patronise indigenous Auctioneers, He stated: “We play greater roles in entrenching good governance and if Government can pay attention to all confiscated, forfeited and abandoned Assets scattered across the country as pinpointed by the Nigeria Association of Auctioneers, Government can generate more than N4 Trillion on sales of all those items wasting away and if indigenous Auctioneers are engaged to dispose them by open competitive auction sales, further depreciation in value of the items can be averted.

General Secretary of the Association, Engr. Isibor Abhulimen who described the Association as a Disposing Body emphasized the need for members to get registered as stipulated by the BPP Act. He said that Auctioneers are masters in turning waste to wealth adding: “that’s why we always make it point of duty to lend our voice to broaden the mindsets of the Government because of our vast knowledge of Auctioneering business in Nigeria. We are registered with the Government of Nigeria and we are conversant with the terrain of doing business in Nigeria.
Isibor continued: “NAA is relevant in the area of Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) which is the reason President Muhammad Buhari CFR made the remarks that we can fund 10 percent to 15 percent of our National Budget from sales of recovered assets and that is our expectations.

“If you want to quantify the value of Assets to be disposed from point of the National Budget, we are Looking at 15 percent to 20 percent and the Budget in its entirety is close to N10 Trillion.“We are also concerned about professionalism because we are interested in Government having the best value for money and the only way this can be achieved is when the Government actually ensure that professional Auctioneers with relevant documents as stipulated by the BPP Act are actually engaged in the sales of those items”

“We train and retrain our Auctioneers in order to establish our knowledge base and that is why we have partnership with the School of Auctioneers in South African and we have synergies our relationship with them, I have taken my members to the School and we want to bring the partnership back home to Nigeria so that our members don’t have to go all the way to South Africa to master the business of Auctioneering”

Speaking on e-auction, he said, ,’We don’t have the Legislation that back up e-auction, but of recent we have the Government policy which is e-Government policy and we expect the Nigeria Custom to integrate into this policy because we the Auctioneers have fully integrated into the e-Gov policy so that disposal can be easily done.

“When the CG of Custom decided to do e-auction they included perishable and non perishable and that created the highest level of litigation ever recorded in any Auction sales done in Nigeria unlike when Nigeria Association of Auctioneers use to handle their Auction sales.

“We are happy that Comptroller General of Nigeria Custom has acknowledged their mistakes and now willing to do business with the Nigeria Association of Auctioneers”, he said.