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    Why The Cost Of Commodities Is Increasing Every Day In The Market

    In January, you went to buy Titus sardines to cook your noodles. To your shock, it cost you N400. Four-hundred Naira! You grumble and buy it, making a mental note to stay off Titus for as long as possible.

    Yesterday, 7 months later, you have finally gotten over the shock of the price of Titus. You’ve even forgotten about that. So you decide to eat pasta, and you have a sudden craving for Titus sardines. You go out to buy it from the same shop you bought it from in January, but to your horror, it now goes for N600. You start to wonder why.

    There’s a long and short explanation. I’ll give a short one here:

    Last year, the Nigerian Customs Service generated N2.3 trillion as revenue. In 2022 however, the House of Representative Committee on Customs and Excise set a N4.1 trillion benchmark for the service. The Nigerian Customs Service is determined to meet this target, and at a meeting with the house committee, they disclosed that they’re doing their possible best to meet this target.

    But what are the customs actually doing?

    While revenue generation is important, the customs are imposing spot valuation duty charges on imports, driving up the cost of every good cleared at the port. According to the New Telegraph:

    “The NCS has been imposing arbitrary spot price duty valuation on some essential commodities and raw materials for food processing. Investigations by New Telegraph showed that NCS is currently using an arbitrary approach to arrive at the duty value of imported goods by taking the current spot prices as a benchmark for computation. What this simply means is that Customs is using the Consumer Price index (CPI) to compute value and charge duty and this is driving duty up and further negatively impacting the cost of production and food prices.”

    The multiplier effect is what? Your N600 Titus Fish, by the time you finish reading this post, will become N700.

    There’s a longer explanation, like the rising cost of diesel. But that is a global problem, and while other countries are trying to ameliorate the effects of inflation on their citizens, the Nigerian Customs Service in collusion with the House of Representatives is driving up the costs of consumer goods, and the ordinary Nigerian is paying the heavy price for it.

    Urgent actions are needed to arrest the current food inflationary trend in Nigeria to avert a looming food crisis. It is the responsibility of this administration to rescue the Nigerian masses from eminent hunger and starvation.

    NigeriaFoodSecurity #NigeriaFoodPolicy #NigeriaFoodSufficiency

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