By Gabriel Ewepu

Cashew farmers, under the auspices of the National Cashew Association of Nigeria, NCAN, cried out to President Bola Tinubu on Tuesday over illicit cashew exports from Nigeria.

The National President of NCAN, Dr Joseph Ajanaku, expressed deep pain and concern about the trend while speaking with Vanguard about how the country is suffering huge losses caused by some government officials.

According to Ajanaku, cashews from Nigeria are shipped abroad via the backdoor, and they do not follow due process, which causes the country to lose revenue that would otherwise have come to the country.

He accused some officials of the Nigerian Customs Service of conniving with foreigners who ship cashews with impunity, and nobody makes any effort to bring them to book.

He said, “The only way we can block this illegal shipment of cashews from Nigeria is for us to get the information so that we will know where the goods are passing through, which we already know because they are using forwarders, and the forwarders are the people that we know. They give two kinds of bills: non-documented shipment and documented shipment, with two prices; how much it will cost to do non-documented and documented.

“We want President Bola Tinubu to take this matter seriously and block this kind of illegal cashew exports without documentation. If this is not done, Nigeria will continue to experience huge capital flights, which would affect the government’s ability to generate foreign exchange and threaten the cashew industry.

“The government should be serious about it and find a way of blocking it by strengthening the operations of the Nigerian Customs Service to ensure no agricultural commodity leaves Nigeria undocumented, and by so doing, we will know exactly what we are producing, and we will be able to repatriate all the money that is accrued to whatever is exported.

“The Nigerian Customs Service and the Department of State Security Service, DSS, should work in synergy to fish out these corrupt officers and be dealt with in order to arrest the situation because the revenue leakage is dangerous to the economy and the cashew value chain including other agric commodities.

Meanwhile, the NCAN boss said there is also international conspiracy to de-market the cashew farmers and dealers in Nigeria; therefore, claimed that Nigeria is producing only 100,000 metric tonnes of cashew annually compared with Cote D’Ivoire whom they claimed is producing 1 million metric tonnes annually, which he (Ajanuku) refuted the claim, saying cashew production in Nigeria stands at over 1 million metric tonnes annually based on the report by the National Agricultural Extension Research and Liaisons Service, NAERLS.