Every passing day, smugglers employ new tricks in their illicit trade in order to out smart unsuspecting custom men and officers of other agencies, detailed to man the nation’s porous boarders, as recent investigations showed that they now use vehicle spare tyres to smuggle rice into the country.
The custom comptroller, South West zone in Ikeja, Lagos, Hussien Ejibunu at the service 2023 briefing, admitted that it would be difficult for any officer to suspect that spare tyres in a vehicle were used to smuggle rice.
Ejibunu who took reporters to the government warehouse littered with impounded huge number of bags of rice and other seized items at Toyin street, Ikeja, disclosed that rice concealed in five spare tyres make a fifty kilogram bag of rice.
“This is how the smugglers repackaged imported foreign rice and claimed it to be Nigeria or local rice,” he said.
The comptroller also disclosed that a recent operations by men of his command, showed that the smugglers in their desperation, stock grains of f rice in vehicle engine, and rebag it as local rice.
Ejibunu also disclosed that machineries are already being put in place to checkmate the excesses of smugglers whose illicit activities only help to pull down Nigeria’s economy.
In this regard, he said that the command has perfected plans to deploy technology in it’s operations, adding that a tracking device has been acquired to reveal the content of a container without opening it.
The comptroller reinstated the commitment of men of his command to chase smugglers off the Nigeria’s boarder.
Other seized items in the warehouse, include fairly used tyres otherwise known as tokunbo, illicit drugs as bags of India ham and host of others too numerous to mention.
It would however be recalled that upon assumption office as President of Nigeria, Muhammadu Buhari ordered total closure of the nation’s porous boarders with the primary agenda of encouraging consumption of locally grown rice.
Ironically, the pervading insecurity crisis would not allow local farmers to enjoy the Monopoly. Consequently, smugglers now seized the opportunity to fill the gap created poor harvest of local rice due to the insecurity crisis
