…Impounds 2.1m bottles of killer Analgin injection,1,920 bags of foreign rice
Four months after the closure of land borders by the federal government of Nigeria, the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) has raised fresh alarm over the sudden upsurge in the smuggling of contraband products into the country.
Comptroller Kayode Olusemire in charge of the Federal Operations Unit (FOU) Zone C of the NCS, Wednesday made the disclosure to newsmen.
The zonal controller said his men have impounded a container load of 2,127,600 bottles of Analgin injection and 1,920 bags of foreign rice and other items with a total Duty Paid Value (DPV) of over N492 million between October and November this year.
Olusemire, who took journalists round to sight the seizures also said that the service equally seized 521 bales of second hand clothings and 233 foreign furniture falsely declared as generators and house hold wares.
Six persons he said were arrested in connection with the importation of the the banned products.
Olusemire expressed concern that analgin
injection, said to be deadlier than tramadol and which had been banned by
most advanced nations of the world including Switzerland and America is still
being imported by some Nigerians into the country in their quest to make quick
money.
The customs controller said the drug was banned in Nigeria by the federal government after it was discovered to have caused the death of two students of Delta State University in 2005 and disfigured many others.
“This is a drug that was banned by Switzerland in 1977 and the USA in 1979. It was banned here in 2005 when it was discovered to be deadly. But, some Nigerians are still in the habit of perpetrating evil. They derive joy in doing things that are untoward and abominable.
“They brought in 1182 cartons with 18 packets each. Each of these packets contains 100 bottles totalling over two million bottles. They concealed them in a sealed container supposedly conveying power generating sets but was intercepted along Port Harcourt/ Owerri road”
He lamented that despite the border closures and fight against smuggling of foreign rice, some persons were still bent on smuggling banned products into the country.
Olusemire said in order to evade arrests, most of the smugglers bring in the rice through the creeks and conceal the rice in tippers and cement trucks in the most unhealth form of conveying edible materials.
Dismissing smuggling of prohibited goods as an act of sabotage to the nation’s economy which stifles the growth of local industries, Olusemire advised Nigerians to learn to produce and to consume locally produced goods, stressing that border closure was an inevitable option by the government to protect and to safeguard the nation’s economy and protect local industries.
