A maritime industry stakeholder and Chief Executive Officer of Multimix Academy; Dr. Obiora Madu, has accused importers of damaged vehicles of creating environmental problems for the country.
Madu, who said this last week in an interview with Shipping Position Daily in Lagos, also blamed the high importation of damaged vehicles as the major cause of the various vehicle wrecks that are seen all over the country.
“We are simply creating an environmental problem for ourselves because vehicles that have already finished their life time coming in they end up being dumped. That is why anywhere you go you see rickety and wrecks of vehicles everywhere”, he said.
According to him, much should be done in the area of regulations of the age limits of vehicles that are supposed to come into the country, even as he explained that the whole idea is to prevent junks from coming into the country.
“I don’t know what the rule or regulation is now about the age of vehicles. If you decide on the minimum or maximum number of years that you want for vehicles to come in, then you stick to it. The whole idea is to make sure that you don’t have junks here. But the fact is that even the things that are banned are coming in so how do you solve this. We need to solve a lot of issues that is what I think about that”, he added.
Reacting to the recent decision of the government to ban the importation of truck which are above 10 years from the year of manufacturing, he said that the greatest challenge the country is having is not making policies, but the implementation.
Madu also charged the government to ensure the offenders are properly punished.
“Well making policies are not the main challenge the challenge is in implementation and it means we have to strengthen our implementation.
There are lots of irregularities going on and unless we punish non-compliance it’s very important. Because if you don’t punish them which means you are encouraging them, that is where I think the problem is”, he explained.
Also speaking, a chieftain of National Association of Government Approved Freight Forwarders (NAGAFF); Mr. Ugochukwu Nnadi, blamed the high rate of duty on new vehicles as the major reason for the high importation of damaged vehicles.
“It is because the duty payable on new vehicles coming into the country is made to be very high by the government through the customs. They refuse to update the value of vehicles every year, assuming the values of vehicles are updated yearly you will see that it will be cheaper to import new vehicles than damaged ones. But because these duties are not updated yearly, the values are high and people will start looking for a way of bringing in these vehicles are pay less”, he submitted.
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