By Moses Ebosele, ebosele@hotmail.com –
Between Janaury and December 2017, Nigerians paid N137billion duty on 399,556 imported used and news vehicles.
Speaking at an interactive session with print, television and online editors in Lagos on Thursday, spokesperson of Nigeria Customs Service (NCS), Joseph Attah explained that 956,574 vehicles were imported in 2014, 558,517 in 2015 and 451,507 in 2016.
Details such as numbers of new vehicles imported by each dealer, amount of duty paid, among others, were not ready as at press time.
City BusinessNews (www.citybusinessnews.com) will publish the details immediately all the compilations are completed.
Attah attributed increase in duty collected on vehicles from N111billion in the previous year to N137billion in 2017 to strict deployment of digital identification method “which enables officers to identify consignment such as vehicle using the mandatory number (VIN)”.
He added: “Declaration on vessels increased drastically in 2017 due to the use of digital application to locate vessels on Nigeria waters and request for payment of appropriate duties as data of the vessels are available through the digital platform”.
Meanwhile, the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) has donated 421 trailers of rice totalling 252,666 bags valued at N3.78 billion to Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in the last 22 months.
Attah, a Deputy Comptroller of Customs, explained that the donations were in line with a Presidential directive on the disposal of perishable seizures after due diligence of court condemnation.
He said that the donations were made in four states of Borno, Yobe, Adamawa and Edo.
Attah said that the donations were carried out by the National Logistics Committee consisting of members from NCS, the Nigerian Army, Nigerian Air Force, Nigeria Police Force and the Federal Road Safety Commission.
Others are: Nigerian Security and Civil Defence Corps, National Food and Drug Administration and Control, Nigerian Television Authority, News Agency of Nigeria, Nigeria Union of Journalists and the Red Cross.
In addition to the rice donation, he said that the Service also donated 82,140 jerrycans of 25-litre vegetable oil valued at N985.6 million, soap worth N52.6 million in 19,491 cartons and other items including clothes.
Attah said that other goods were insecticides, foot wears, bags and 1 x40ft container of frozen tilapia fish.
He said that sustained Customs anti-smuggling efforts had kept the service warehouses filled with seizures in spite of the various donations made by the service to IDPs.
“In spite of the tonnes of rice and other relief items already transferred to the IDPs, some NCS warehouses are still filled with rice.
“This only shows that the sustained onslaught against unrepentant rice smugglers continues to yield positive results.
“The ones in the warehouses now are either awaiting court condemnation or forfeiture to the Federal Government or have already been allocated to governments of the affected states, who paid the Army Corps of Transport and Logistics for transportation of the goods to the IDPs.
