Speaking to news men shortly after the weekly Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting at the Presidential Villa, Abuja, Chief Ogbe said: “as for importation I’m afraid that we have developed an appetite for import which will take a while to cure. There are Nigerians who will use their cell phones to import pizza from London. They won’t taste pizza made in Nigeria. You can’t ban them; you can’t go into laws on that because people will say you are being trivial.”
The minister swore that if India had done what Nigeria did in 1986 by opening its doors to import as freely as it did, India would have ceased to exist by now; they locked their doors against reckless importation.
“Instead, here (in Nigeria), we opened our door to what they called free trade. We didn’t just open our doors, we removed our roof and windows and foreigners dumped whatever they wanted.
Today, we are blaming the current government. What happened was bound to happen because we were far too much into importation of just everything. Food exports have gone up in Nigeria in the last one year by 82 percent and we want to make sure that what we send meets the finest standard in the market.
“If people choose to use their money to import irregular or unnecessary items, government would look into that and apply adequate regulations to rationalize importation. We are not banning anything but if you must import things that are not necessary, be prepared to pay the duty on them.”
Chief Audu Ogbe is happy that the tight economic situation is gradually curtailing the attitude of Nigerians to import, saying: “thank God we are getting a bit broke, so people are cutting down on those luxuries. I can ask you for instance is champagne our priority at this time.” [myad]
