At a press conference in Yola, the Adamawa State, CBN branch controller, Mr. Jatau Sadu said that so far a number of contraband were seized by the DSS following raids on many properties where the contrabands were hidden.
” The DSS raided some places and recover stockpiled in these houses four different items including 1,207 bags of foreign rice, 10 jerry cans of groundnut oil, 58 bottles of energy drinks and 83 bags of sugar.
He noted that the new resolve and cooperation was aimed at enhancing the rapid growth of Nigeria’s economy leveraging on the agricultural sector to boost the country’s foreign exchange, and also to ensure food security in the country.
“We all know the efforts of the federal government in diversifying the economic base of the country, especially from a crude oil-dependent economy to a more comparatively advantageous resource in agriculture.
“For a long time the CBN has actually been complimenting the effort of the federal government in that respect especially given our intervention programs in various sectors of the economy particularly agricultural sector,” he said.
He noted that to achieve the diversification drive, the CBN has evolved a number of strategies including the Anchor Borrowers scheme, to ensure the growth of the agricultural sector.
” Recently the CBN introduced the anchor borrowers program and we know the success story in Kebbi State and many other states. In particular we recorded great success in Adamawa State but we have been encountering some challenges and the desire of the federal government is to ensure that we create jobs for our people especially the teeming youth in particular and feed the nation and generate income.“Recently, Nigeria has stepped up from primary level of production to the secondary level of production which is processing so that we can improve the shelf life of most of our produce. That is why we have the anchor borrowers scheme because the anchor borrowers will ensure the complete value chain in the agricultural business.“Unfortunately, these efforts that we are proud of is being frustrated by some unscrupulous elements in our society. People who believed in their personal pecuniary penchant for mundane things will smuggle foreign rice in particular into our economy thereby frustrating our farmers and the effort of government.
” What we essentially have been able to do is to partner with the security organization,” he said.
He noted that in view of Nigeria’s vast porous borders and the scant number of customs operatives to man them, the partnership with the DSS became imperative noting that so far the cooperation has led to seizure of a number of contrabands smuggled into the country.
“We discover that Nigeria has porous borders and the customs charged with the responsibility of controlling the borders are not adequate enough to cover all those porous borders and so many times we discovered that products like foreign rice get into our economy into the market.
“So when we partner with the DSS to find out the source where these products are coming from we were able to discover that these people circumvent conventional way of warehousing these products by even going to hire individual houses to store some of these products instead of the warehouse. So with their interaction with the public, they got this information.
Jatau said that the DSS is planning to distribute the impounded food items to the IDPs camps, the motherless baby homes and orphanages, organized Almajiri houses, and religious organizations that have organized IDP camps.
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