Nigeria hub of stolen vehicles -Finance Minister, Zainab Ahmed

Nigeria’s Minister of Finance, Budget, and National Planning, Zainab Ahmed, has described the country as the hub of stolen vehicles in the world.

Ahmed said most of the vehicles plying the road of Nigeria cannot be traced by government agencies as their Vehicle Identification Number (VIN) are not registered.

The minister based her conclusion on statistics from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) which states that 45 per cent of vehicles are smuggled into the country annually.

She furthered stated that 40 per cent of these vehicles are stolen, and that both the smuggled and stolen vehicles evade duty payment in the country.

Ahmed made this known on Thursday, at the zonal sensitisation seminar on the National Vehicle Registry (VREG) policy in Abuja.

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The National Bureau of Statistics confirmed that between 2015 and 2019, Nigeria imported an average of 300,000 vehicles with an average of 48 per cent increase in import annually, while an additional 45 per cent of vehicles are smuggled into the country annually, thus evading duty payment of which 40 per cent of these vehicles are stolen.”

Ahmed also cited a case study which stated that Nigeria recorded over N1.8 trillion I value of used vehicle importation between October 2018 to September 2019.

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