“High Tariffs to Push More Importers Out of Business In 2016” – NAGAFF

The chairman of Murtala Muhammed Airport arm of NAGAFF, Segun Musa, who made the prediction, revealed that the unfavorable import policies drove many importers out of the country to set up in neighboring countries.

“This is a big way through which the government is losing money. They end up enriching the neighbouring countries through whose ports the importers now use to bring in goods into Nigeria.

“The revenue leakage is more than the revenue collected in Nigeria, the tariff on imports is so high and that has taken a lot of business out Nigeria,”he said.

“High import tariff by Customs is not favourable to importers and has led to poor relationship between importers and the Customs,” Musa added.

“We have criticized the Pre-arrival Arrival Report (PAAR) that government should not saddle the Customs with issuance of that certificate but the Customs came with all kinds of snow whiting discuss that there won’t be any query again when they start issuing the Certificate, but that has not been the case,” he noted.

He however, called on the federal government to engage the private sector in policy formulations in order to get things right stressing that importation was not responsible for the demise of some major industries in the country but as a result of bad roads, insecurity and poor power supply.