Importers of Restricted Items to be Blacklisted – CBN

• Importers of Restricted Items to be Blacklisted – CBN

In an effort to curtail rising importation of restricted items, president Muhammadu Buhari has directed the Central Bank of Nigeria to blacklist any company, owner or top management smuggling restricted items into the Nigerian economy.

The Central Bank of Nigeria restricted a total of 43 items to reduce pressure on foreign exchange reserves and deepen local manufacturing across Nigeria.

However, businesses and individuals still struggling to set up a manufacturing factory in Nigeria are smuggling some of the restricted items into the country.

According to the CBN, despite the restriction on palm oil importation, Nigeria spends about $500 million on palm oil importation yearly. This, the Federal Government said must stop to grow the local market.

The government recently added textile to restricted items and sponsored 100,000 cotton farmers to stimulate growth in the textile sector.

The CBN governor, Godwin Emefiele, on Friday announced a presidential directive mandating the apex bank to blacklist smugglers of restricted items across the Nigerian banks.

He said, “We want to ensure palm oil production is aggressively increased in Nigeria. Nigeria in the 50s and 60s used to be the largest producer of oil palm in the world with a market share of 40 per cent.

“For one reason or the other, particularly because we found crude oil which by any analysis is cheaper than palm oil, we decided to abandon our God-given gift of palm oil. By doing that, we lost jobs.

“Our farm lost jobs because we began to import palm oil from different parts of the world.

“The presidential directive that we have received is not about palm oil alone. We have received a presidential directive to focus on the production of ten different commodities.

“And this is the programme we will be embarking upon in the next couple of years. The ten different products are rice, maize, cassava, tomatoes, cotton, oil palm, poultry, fish, livestock dairy and cocoa.

“The presidential directive that we received said that we must expand and seek to give support to people who want to expand the production of these products in Nigeria.

“Another part of that presidential directive also says that we should blacklist from the foreign exchange market and the banking industry all firms, their owners and their top management caught smuggling or dumping any of the restricted 43 items into Nigeria.”