Olusola Obabori, group executive director, Business & Corporate Service, NAHCO Plc, has said “de minimis”, which is a policy referring to the minimum value of goods that can be imported duty-free and without cumbersome customs procedures, is what will drive intra-African trade.
He said this on Tuesday at the BusinessDay 2023 Logistics Conference held in Lagos.
“If you order things from US, UK, for example, there is a minimum price under which nothing is charged,” he explained.
“Try and imagine what happens within West Africa for example, if there’s a de minimis of say, $500. It means”, anything that you’re importing within $500 range, customs will not charge anything on it.
“So when you’re talking about intra-African trade, that’s what is going to drive it, which means I can sit down in my house and be ordering for shoes and clothes that are made in Ghana and it’ll come easily.”
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He said Africa can trade seamlesy with Africa very easily with this as an incentive.
Stakeholders in the logistics industry that attended the event said the de minimis policy, which Nigeria does not have currently, aims to streamline trade processes and reduce bureaucratic hurdles, encouraging increased movement of goods within the continent.
“We’ve sometimes in the past tried to force the West African customs to work together and come up with this to ensure that we can trade but the bureaucracy of government will never let that happen,” said Obabori.
Obabori added that a major impediment to the adoption of this policy is that everyone is hustling for revenue, even government.
“Who is going to now help the businesses to grow if government wants to get revenue?” he asked.
“There’s a whole lot of thinking that has to go into what government is doing. How do you drive intra-african trade? There is AfCFTA, let us come and x-ray it and see what impact it has had since it came up. What has it done for Africa? How well is Africa trading within itself?” Obabori added.
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Morolayo Igeleke, country marketing manager, UPS Nigeria, also said that Nigeria is one of the few countries in the world where there is no de minimis policy.
“In Nigeria, there’s no boundary, you pay for every single thing you bring in, even if you’re bringing a $5 package,” Igeleke said.
According to him, traders and operators are left at the mercy of custom duty representatives, with cases of having to negotiate with them.
He further said there are also a lot of instances where Customs charge an amount this minute for import duty, and charge a different amount the next minute.
“So the customer is constantly confused and the courier industry struggle a lot trying to convince the customers that it’s not them determining charges, but the customs duty changing their import duty value.
“I think there’s only about 2 or 3 countries in the world like that, every other country has a de minimis level.”
