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The government announced the ban in a directive from the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investment to the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA), Lagos Port Complex, Apapa, Lagos.
NPA in a letter signed by Buba Jubril for the Port Manager, Lagos Port Complex said, the ban is to protect the sugar industry, which is governed by the Nigerian Sugar Master Plan (NSMP).
“It has recently come to our notice that due to the recent location of a Sugar Refinery in a Free Trade Zone, Refined Sugar is being imported into the Nigerian Customs Territory under the concession granted to enterprises in the Free Trade Zones to export 100% of their output to the Nigerian Customs Territory, and this is real potential threat to the goals of the Nigerian Sugar Master Plan (NSMP),” NPA said.
Nigeria will no longer provide foreign currency for importers of sugar and wheat, the central bank said on Twitter on Friday, as the country tries to conserve national dollar reserves.
Africa’s most populous country, and its biggest economy, relies on imports to feed its 200 million people. The central bank restricted access in 2015 to foreign exchange for 41 items it says can be produced locally, and has added to the list since then.
“Sugar and wheat to go into our FX restriction list. We must work together to produce these items in Nigeria rather than import them,” the central bank said in a tweet.
While, a monopoly in an economy could not be described as an animate being in the same way that mythical Medusa was, its menace of destructively consuming communities renders it an altered personification of a hydra-headed monster itself. And like most fabled Gorgon monsters, a valiant heroic Titan is needed to defeat it.
In our world, the recent ‘sugar’ dispute between Dangote Industries Limited and The BUA Group is a modern-day reverberating saga of how this different form of hydra-headed monster, is being confronted and gallantly defeated by one of Nigeria’s very own indigenous Titans.
A monopoly, in any form, is truly a hydra-headed monster, which has a penchant for destroying the Nigerian dream and does not prognosticate well for the economy primarily. There are several facets that render a monopoly a hydra-headed monster, least of which is that it creates a market concentration that likely results in higher commodity prices than in a more competitive market.
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