Rice smuggling

Just as well: the Steering Committee of the National Taskforce on the illegal importation of rice through land borders is mulling an inter-agency approach to policing Nigeria’s porous borders.

The Benin border has been a beehive of economic sabotage, with tonnes and tonnes of smuggled rice, via the Cotonou Ports.  That is despite that the ECOWAS Protocol on movement of imported goods frowns at such unconscionable sabotage.

It’s high time, therefore, Nigeria got tough: against Nigerian Judases, who for personal greed sabotage their home economy; and for Benin Republic, which seems unable to resist illicit revenue at Nigeria’s dire expense.  This twin-reckless behaviour must stop.  The security agencies should sit up and see to it.

Andy Ekwelem, director-general, Rice Producers Association of Nigeria (RPAN), just shared a rather troubling intelligence: over 566, 000 metric tonnes of rice had arrived Republic of Benin Cotonou Ports from Thailand and India.

It takes no especial acuity to figure that armada is meant for Nigeria, via smuggling.  Benin simply lacks the capacity to consume all that stuff.  The clear target is to derail Nigeria’s goal of food security.  That must be resisted by all legal and legitimate means.

It’s even more roiling that such umpteenth outrage comes from the Benin front, after its border with Nigeria was shut for some one year, following complaints linked to rice, fuel and allied smuggling.

But it is equally heart-warming that the Nigerian Customs Service (NCS) appears rallying to the challenge.  ”It is always like that at the end of the year,” Timi Bomodi, NCS deputy public affairs officer disclosed. “We anticipated this and more officers are going to be deployed to the borders to check the smuggling.”

He further enthused: “There is no number yet but they will come from the various intervention units; the commands, the Federal Operations Unit.  We have the Strike Force Unit, the border drill which is a combined unit that comprises Customs and other military and paramilitary officers,” he told The Punch.

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That not only appears impressive but it is clearly in sync with a re-booted inter-agency approach Col. Hameed Ali (rtd), the NCS director-general, had pushed at the steering committee meeting.

Ali had declared: “The NCS cannot fight alone in the operation of border patrol.  It needs other security agencies such as the Nigerian Civil Defence Corps to beef up the joint operations of the task force.”

At that meeting too, Dr. Mohammed Abubakar, agriculture and rural development minister, said Nigeria could not risk a rise in rice smuggling, which could scuttle the gains it had made these past six years, in increased public-private sector investment in agriculture.

Indeed rice (and the bold investments in its entire value chain) has been the poster-crop of the Buhari Presidency’s campaign for Nigerians to “grow what you eat and eat what you grow”.

Rice also appears the clear symbol of a putative rebirth of a thriving local real sector, with agro-allied industries powering back re-industrialisation; and creating millions of new jobs.  These goals are too vital to be derailed by rice smuggling.

Also at that meeting were Dahiru Ado, chair of the Presidential Committee on Trade Malpractice, A. E. Obekwe, representative of the commandant-general, Nigerian Civil and Security Defence Corps and Babatunde Irukera, CEO of the Federal Competition Consumer Protection Commission.

It is good that the meeting pushed for stiffer penalties against companies smuggling in foreign rice through land borders (clearly illegal, as rice is only allowed in through the sea ports, where the requisite duties are charged).

It also advocated the further re-orienting of Nigerians to buy local rice so as to shut out foreign brands, particularly with progressive improvements in rice milling, packaging and allied processes of the past six years.

While Nigeria could consider signing anti-smuggling pacts with its nettling neighbours, the Presidential Committee on Trade Malpractice should also explore invoking the Protocol on the movement of imported goods to seek ECOWAS sanctions against Benin and its treacherous rice imports.

The inter-agency security agencies too should crank up their act against this renewed smuggling.  However here, talk is cheap.  Smuggling couldn’t have thrived this far without rogue border patrol elements cutting sweetheart deals with smugglers.

Let the revamped inter-agency border patrol, therefore, not prove yet another Yuletide “growth area” for unscrupulous troopers at the borders. Nigeria must kill smuggling before smuggling kills Nigeria.