Customs: Petrol smuggling affecting FX availability

The Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) says the rising rate of petrol smuggling in the country is a major factor affecting the foreign exchange (FX) availability in the country.

Husseini Ejibunnu, coordinator of the operation whirlwind taskforce team, spoke on Tuesday in Lagos while displaying seized petrol.

Ejibunnu said there were many smugglers seeking dollars in order to smuggle petrol.

“It causes economic and security challenges. Economic in the essence that when you have an excess of this outside, it tells on our exchange rate. Because right now, there are so many smugglers out there looking for dollars to go out there, which will affect our naira,” he said.

Also, Ejibunnu said petrol smuggling had adversely affected the supply of the product to Nigerians.

“Another economic disadvantage is that we in the country won’t see the product to use,” Ejibunnu said.

“The security implications are grievous, in the sense that when these products fall into the hands of non-state actors, terrorists, and kidnappers, they would use these things to oil their machines to come in and attack us.”

He urged members of the public to be willing to readily provide customs with information on smugglers.

“Now it behoves all of us to come up with credible information as to those that are supplying these products to non-state actors to come and attack us,” he said.

“The irony of things is that why do we want to oil the machine of our attackers? We are giving them power, we gave them the energy to come in by giving them these products. 

“If we are able to cut the supply chain of this, it would have reduced their activities by 50 per cent because when they don’t see fuel to use, they won’t be able to come in.”

Ejibunnu added that ‘operation whirlwind’ was supposed to be in place for three months, but its tenure had been extended to an additional four months.