Due to issues with foreign exchange in the nation, car imports decreased by 45% in the first quarter of 2024, according to Adewale Adeniyi, Comptroller General of the Nigeria Customs Service.
Because of the fluctuation in exchange rates, Adeniyi noted in a recent interview with Arise Television that the moment was extremely critical for Nigerians and businesses in general.
“It affected car dealers. We had as much as a 45 per cent 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,” the CGC stated.
He was optimistic that things had started picking up in the second quarter of the year, saying,
“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.”
Adeniyi provided an update on the private jet owners’ verification exercise, stating that since the announcement of the verification, a sizable number of private jet owners have begun to leave Nigeria.
The departing jets, he said, do not want to be confirmed.
He said that hardly many owners have participated in the exercise since it began a few weeks ago.
“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,” he asserted.
Adeniyi states that if an aircraft is going to be operated in Nigeria, the owners must come to Nigeria Customs and pay the customs duty when the aircraft is brought in and registered.
The CGC clarified that more private aircraft were operating outside of legal boundaries, which is why the service initiated a private jet owners’ verification exercise.
“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 said.
The Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority provided data to the CGC, which showed that while many private aircraft were flying in the nation, very few of them were paying customs duty.
According to Adeniyi, the service realised N2 billion when the exercise began at some point in 2019.
“Recall that this was not the first time we did it. We did something close to this in 2019 and the exercise fetched us as much as N2bn within the short time that we did it.
“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.
International aviation law mandates that private aircraft operating in Nigeria pay duty, according to the customs administration.
“If they are here for a brief period in the Nigerian air space and go, they are not obliged to pay any duty. If they were here on a temporary importation visit but once they are here and used within Nigeria, they are liable to pay duty,”
The CGC underlined that the purpose of the verification process was to verify who was operating legally and who wasn’t.
According to the customs helmsman, one of the main motivators for smugglers is the increase in fuel prices in bordering nations.
