A maritime lawyer; Emmanuel Nwagbara, has taken the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) to the cleaners accusing the service of colluding with vehicle smugglers to carry out the illegal act.
Nwagbara, who said this in a chat with Shipping Position Daily in Lagos last week, also called for review of the automobile policy, adding that the policy never worked right from inception.
He maintained that the ban on the importation of vehicles through the land border has given rise to several illegal activities going on in the sector and also loss of revenue.
He reiterated that in reviewing the automobile policy, special attention should be given to the tariffs payable on imported vehicles to discourage smuggling.
He said: “Obviously there is need for it to be reviewed because it has not actually worked and lots of vehicles still flood the Nigeria automobile market illegally because of the porous borders we have and the collusion of the Nigerian customs with smugglers”.
Citing an example, he told our correspondent that, “recently I was involved (not directly) with a case where smugglers hacked into DTI of a particular licensee and used it to ferry lots of vehicles across the border. And the Nigeria Customs discovered that lots of revenue was lost as a result of that and they made arrests and all that, the case is still ongoing in terms of investigation”.
According to him, “that is a typical example of what happens every day, so there is need to review that and alongside the review there is also need to review tariff on imported vehicles”.
He argued that the high tariffs payable on imported vehicles encourages smuggling and other sharp practices that are prevalent in vehicle importation business.
“I believe that if the tariffs are low, our importers won’t be encouraged to smuggle vehicles into the country and more revenues will come in, revenue will be higher than what we are getting today. Because as you know all the revenues that would have been paid on the vehicles that were smuggled into the country but were caught are not recorded”, he added.
He said that a lot of revenue is lost to smuggling of vehicles as the intercepted vehicles are mostly auctioned below their value and the duty that would have been paid on those vehicles.
Explaining further, he said that if the vehicles can be allowed to come into the country through land border and seaports and appropriate duties paid on them, the customs will record more revenue.
“What I mean is that if a vehicle is smuggled into the country but was intercepted by the Nigeria Customs, the revenue they realize from there is nothing to write home about. They are sold on auction even sometimes they are sold less than the duty that was supposed to be paid on that vehicle. So if we legalize the importation of vehicles they can come in through the land border or the sea and we review the import duty on that vehicle, the revenue we will get from the Nigeria Customs Service will be different from what we are getting today”, he stated.
On the automotive policy of the Federal Government, the legal practitioner said that instead of the policy aiding local assembly of vehicles; it is adversely affecting it .
“The automobile policy, the aspect that should be reviewed will also include 70% tariff on new vehicles; it is not working because some of the new vehicles you see in automobile market in the country today were also smuggled into the country. If the tariffs were lower it would discourage smuggling new vehicles into the country”.
“When these new vehicles are smuggled into the country, people still buy them and they are registered and used. And therefore there is tendency for people to look out for cheap vehicles because they are successfully smuggled into the country and duties are not paid on them. You find out that they become cheaper than the ones that paid duty, vehicles should be allowed to be imported through land borders”, he concluded.
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