By Akoma Chinweoke

Stakeholders in the country’s health sector have faulted  the new tax  policy of  the “Import Adjustment Tax” by Federal Ministry of Finance, describing it as capable of discouraging potential investors and warned that pharmaceutical services will no longer be affordable thereby reducing its demand.

Already,many Nigerians are currently going through pain and hardship as the leadership of the Nigerian Customs Service has said there is no going back on the implementation of 20percent duty on medicament.

Meanwhile, experts have pointed out that,  the recent directive from the Finance  Ministry on tax would do more harm than good  to the economy especially as it runs contrary to President Muhammudu’s Buhari’s mandate to ensure efficient health care delivery in the  country.

It would be recalled that  in a circular released recently from Ministry  titled “Import Adjustment Tax.”, the minister ordered the introduction of 20percent tax on imported medicament in the pharmaceutical sector. This means that for every imported drugs and allied products, a minimum duty of 20 percent is payable to the coffers of government through the Nigeria Customs Service.

This extra payment, analysts insist, will result in more than proportional increases in prices of drugs which definitely will cascade down the ladder to the common man in the street, the very people the government vowed to give affordable and available health care. “They also argued that the policy directive runs contrary to World Trade Organization (WTO) recommendation of not more than 5 percent duty on medicament as a way of fast tracking the achievement of global vision of affordable universal healthcare and eliminating diseases.

Now there seems to be a policy reversal which when combined with the deleterious effects of devalued Naira, high exchange rate , unavailability of the dollar and other foreign currencies have accentuated the suffering of the masses and complicated their health challenges which the current government vowed to drastically reduce.

Already,  prices of medical services and drugs have gone haywire as a result of this not well thought through reversal which according to Ministry of Finance, was necessitated by the need to ramp up revenue generation and support local drug manufacturing. However, Nigeria currently has less than 300 drugs manufacturing companies of which less than 5 percent are WHO certified.