The Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, has accused previous governments of granting lopsided import waivers, saying that President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration now grants waiver to organisations and not individuals
She stated this in Abuja on Tuesday while speaking at a forum organised by the Office of the Senior Special Assistant to the President on Public Affairs.
The minister, who described the previous import waiver policy as being selective, added that it provided an unequal playing field for businesses operating in the country.
The Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, has accused previous governments of granting lopsided import waivers, saying that President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration now grants waiver to organisations and not individuals
She stated this in Abuja on Tuesday while speaking at a forum organised by the Office of the Senior Special Assistant to the President on Public Affairs.
The minister, who described the previous import waiver policy as being selective, added that it provided an unequal playing field for businesses operating in the country.
She said the Federal Government now grants import waiver to different sectors of the economy instead of individuals and individual industries.
Okonjo-Iweala said the decision was as a result of the reform of the country’s import waiver policy to encourage more investment in the country to boost the economy.
She said, “Previously, our import waiver policy was not a very good one. It resulted into an uneven playing field. We were granting waivers to individuals and individual companies; and sometimes, we didn’t do it as strategic as we should have.
Available documents from the Ministry of Finance showed that the government granted N196.53bn worth of import waivers between 2011 and 2013.
A breakdown of the figure showed that the country lost the sum of N55.96bn, N55.34bn and N59.42bn to import waivers in 2011, 2012 and 2013 fiscal years, respectively.
For the first five months of this year, the country lost the sum of N25.8bn to waivers and exemptions, according to the ministry.
But the minister said, “this waiver is now by sector. The idea is to encourage sectors of the economy that require investment.
“For instance, the government gives waiver on agricultural equipment at zero duty to attract companies to come and invest in the country,’’Okonjo-Iweala said.
She said upon assumption of office, one of the first major reforms of the Jonathan administration was to call for a comprehensive review of the import waiver policy in order to enable it to promote competition and encourage investments.
Speaking further, she confirmed that: “All that has been reformed as at three years ago. In fact, I made bold to say that when I first came, at the first Economic Management Team meeting, the first issue that the President put on the table was that we needed to reform the import waiver policy because he felt it generated a lot of rancour.
“If you look now, we give waivers by sectors. Once we give waiver to a sector, everybody in that sector is entitled to get that waiver. And why do we do it? We are doing it now as part of the industrial policy as incentives to attract companies to come and invest.
“So, the waivers you see now are in sectors where we feel we need to encourage investment such as mining, power, agriculture, industries and so on.
So, the waiver policy now is a very rational policy.”
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