Friday, 16 January 2015

NIPOST now collects N500 per parcel

 I was shocked when I got to the post office today and I was told I had to pay N500 for a single parcel received. I was shocked because I know you only pay for a parcel when you send it not when it is received. The painful thing is that the parcel is very small. So you can imagine my pain when I had to pay N2,000 for 4 chinkele parcels i.e N500 x 4.
When I complained. I was told that it is the new order from Abuja, that you are to pay before you collect any parcel, no matter how small.

Nigeria is the only country in the world where this happens. Bad enough we have to pay for every thing in this country; from paying for our international passports (in most countries, your passport is free oh!), sinking our boreholes, paying vigilante to provide security, paying the very annoying fixed service charge on electricity that is not even constant, now we have to pay for any parcel we receive through NIPOST?

If we have to pay for all these, why do we pay taxes? Why do we have leaders?


1 comment:

  1. I went to Yola post office recently to collect a small parcel containing a Micro SIM Adaptor (worth NGN400) I purchased at and the NIPOST staff there told me that there is a circular from "above" that every NIPOST customer must henceforth pay NGN500 per parcel at the point of collection for items bought online.
    I explain to them that this was a personal and not a commercial item hence even Nigeria Customs Service did not charge import duty on it. I also explained that I had already paid AliExpress shipping and handling fees for the product and that the product was not even worth up to NGN500. The staff insisted that they were only following orders. I also learnt that the N500 was just for smaller packages but that the costs would increase for larger packages.
    I was surprised that one had to pay money to collect a parcel the sender had already sent and paid postage fees for. They called it handling charge... The Free Online Dictionary defines "handling charge” as the cost of packaging and mailing an order. What has this charge got to do with receiving a package? NIPOST did not do the packaging or mailing. Their only duty was to deliver it.
    I have resolved that the Nigerian factor has again come to play and one Oga at the Top was actually collecting and embezzling this money they are now collecting. Most people these days buy their items online and so it now seems that NIPOST is getting a lot of parcels lately, especially from China and so, might have introduced these fees just to make money which may never get into the account of government.
    They say ANYTHING GOES in Nigeria but a situation where public establishments exploit the citizenry at will, is really taking it too far.



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