Nigeria's rejected exports

• Published date: 09 January 2023
• Publication title: Nigeria - The Nation

This is an area we must work on if we are serious about diversification.

President and Chairman, Board of Trustees of the African Export-Import Bank, Afrixembank, Prof. Benedict Oramah, would last week remind on why the country's quest for economic diversification has remained a non-starter. At the commissioning of the Africa Quality Assurance Centre (AQAC) in Sagamu, Ogun State, he told his audience that the country not only records an annual loss estimated at $700 million from rejected agro-produce, but also that some 76 per cent of the entire exports from the continent suffer the same fate.

A similar claim was made by Prof. Mojisola Adeyeye, director-general of the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC), in August, 2021. According to her, over 76 per cent of Nigeria's exported agricultural commodities were being rejected by the European Union (EU) for not meeting required standards. And that came long after the highly publicised EU ban on Nigeria's dried beans of June 2015 on the same general premise that it contained high level of pesticide considered dangerous to human health.

Interestingly, that particular ban was extended by three years. Seven years on, nothing appears to have changed in terms of building the requisite capacity, equipping the relevant institutions not to talk of nurturing such fundamental attitudes on the imperatives of quality and standard that the rest of the world have long taken for granted.

Yet, we can count nearly a dozen agencies, all of them claiming to have one or two things to do with either agro-export business or export business in general. From the Nigerian Agricultural Quarantine Service (NAQS) said to be in charge of certifying all agricultural produce leaving the country in line with the World Trade Organization (WTO) protocols; we even had a Federal Produce Inspection Service - a department in the trade and commerce ministry specifically charged with grading agricultural produce, also for export.

Interestingly, President Muhammadu Buhari only just last week transmitted a new bill - the Federal Produce Inspection Service Bill to the National Assembly for consideration and passage - apparently to revamp the...