According to the Nigerian Customs Service, car importation has decreased by an astounding 45%. This is related to the country’s economic troubles, specifically its foreign exchange rate. Adewale Adeniyi, Comptroller General of the Nigeria Customs Service, stated this during an interview with Arise Television.
According to an interview with Adewale Adeniyi on the TV station Arise, the first quarter for Nigerian firms was negative due to the country’s weak currency.
“It affected car dealers. We had as much as a 45 percent decrease in the volume of cars that were brought into Nigeria in that period.
And they were not the kind of cars that fetched optimum revenue for the customs. Not only cars, but even regular imports were also affected because people could no longer import raw materials as they wanted and the volatility did not allow them to plan for tomorrow,” Adewale Adeniyi disclosed.
However, he noted that Q2 might be better, as there are already signs of initiatives being put in place to combat these issues.
“But we see some relative degree of stability in the second quarter because there are lots of discussions going on. Some at the level of the National Assembly, most of them spearheaded by the Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy, bring on the stakeholders that are involved together, to ensure that we achieve stability,” the CGC added.
During the discussion, the Comptroller General discussed the current incident with the verification instruction sent to private jet owners.
In June, the Federal Government, through the Nigerian Customs Service, launched a fresh operation to target operators of illegally imported private jets entering the country.
To that end, they initiated a verification exercise, expecting at least 80 private jet operators to show up at the NCS headquarters in Abuja with their aircraft import documents.
However, this has not been the case, as many of these operators have chosen to leave the country rather than having their paperwork verified.
“Very few of them have shown up for verification and we gathered from intelligence that a good number of them have been leaving Nigeria since the announcement was given because they would not want to be verified,” Adeniyi stated.
“We have seen so many of these aircraft flying and our record tends to show that only a few of them have shown up to pay duty and this is why we are bringing this verification up,” he added.
The Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority gave information to the CGC, indicating that despite numerous private aircraft flying in the nation, very few of them paid customs duty.
“We discovered that there were more private jets that were operating in Nigeria but had not been brought under the ambit of the law. So, the data that we got from the NCAA showed that only very few of them paid customs duty to operate in Nigeria,” Adeniyi stated.
