President Muhammadu Buhari has directed that food and fertilizer importers should not be given access to foreign exchange by the CBN. He said that the country would rather empower more local farmers, and use agriculture as a means to solve unemployment among youths.
The President announced this via his official Twitter handle, @MBuhari on Thursday evening.
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I am restating it that nobody importing food or fertilizer should be given foreign exchange from the Central Bank. We will not pay a kobo of our foreign reserves to import food or fertilizer. We will instead empower local farmers and producers.
— Muhammadu Buhari (@MBuhari) September 10, 2020
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“I am restating it that nobody importing food or fertilizer should be given foreign exchange from the Central Bank. We will not pay a kobo of our foreign reserves to import food or fertilizer. We will instead empower local farmers and producers.
“We have a lot of able-bodied young people willing to work, and agriculture is the answer,” Buhari stated.
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This comes after the Nigeria Customs Service confirmed that 4 companies were given CBN emergency approval to import 262,000 tons of maize into Nigeria, due to maize scarcity, which had nearly crippled the poultry sector, after the CBN banned the processing of Forms M for maize/corn importation into the country.
