Home FEATURES Buhari Declares Total War On Smuggling, Appoints Osinbajo War “General”

Buhari Declares Total War On Smuggling, Appoints Osinbajo War “General”

Buhari 4The Vice President announced this himself today, Monday, at the 6th President quarterly business Forum for private sector stakeholders.

Professor Osinbajo said that smuggling is a serious threat to the nation’s economy, “and Mr. President has asked me to head a team to work out what needs to be done. We are making the point to our neighbors, that smuggling is an existential threat, we can’t permit the level of smuggling going on.”

The Vice President recalled that there was over 500,000 metric tons of rice around Christmas came in through one of Nigeria’s 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.”

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Osinbajo stressed that Nigeria has the right to it is not going to accept smuggling from its neighbours.

“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 neighboring 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.” [myad]