Vice President Yemi Osinbajo has described smuggling as a serious threat to Nigeria’s economy, saying President Muhammadu Buhari had asked him to head a team to work out what ought to be done.
He disclosed this on Monday at the 6th Presidential Quarterly Business Forum for Private Sector Stakeholders, held at the Presidential Villa in Abuja.
He said Nigeria was making the point to its neighbours that smuggling is an existential threat and that the country could no longer permit the level of smuggling going on.
He stated: “Last year, there was over 500,000 metric tonnes of rice around Christmas, which the Minister of Agriculture told us about and how it came in through one of our neighbours, but we blocked it.
“Now, three shiploads of rice have left Thailand, 120,000 metric tonnes, going to this same neighbour of ours who have very large warehouses where they store this rice. It is very clear that this rice is for us because our neighbours don’t consume parboiled rice, they consume the white broken rice. It is clear that our neighbours do excellent business, with allowing rice to come into Nigeria and other products including poultry.
“I think it is important for us as a country, to make the point clear, that we are not going to accept that. We are all within the same economic zone and work together, so we go in a friendly and polite manner as possible, to ensure that this practice stops. For those who are familiar with it, the duty in some of these neighbouring countries, especially for rice, is deliberately set lower than ours, it is about a fourth of ours. We have increased duty tax so as to discourage importation but they would naturally drop duty to encourage import and then it would come to Nigeria.”
