Yes, it has. We said we realise it was going to hurt the industry and that it will affect some of the intended outcomes of the automotive policy. This is a policy that has been reigning for seven years today, we have 14 automotive plants in the country, their combined production is under 50,000 the needs in Nigeria is about 750,000 vehicles.
We were hoping that by now we will have all kinds of value chain addition company building glasses for the cars, building components, nuts, and bolts, we don’t have them, we don’t have them, what is being done is assembly, assembly in some cases very simple and basic level, yes there is staff that is employed but they could have been more. And then the industry would have grown more now and that is not to say that this policy is going to be jettisoned.
Apart from the issue of the cost of transport, Nigerian ports also, people say have become unattractive, one of the reasons that are learned is because of the very high duties, there is a lot of smuggling of vehicles into the country and trade, traffic trade of imported vehicle has moved away from the Nigerian port.
First and foremost I would like to ask why that blanket removal if ideally what we are targeting is food inflation and then secondly, do we have a mechanism for monitoring because this is not the first time that we are talking about food inflation, I do recall when Mrs Adeosun was minister of finance, there was a conversation around the high cost of moving food from north to south and it seemed like resolutions were not.