The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) in a bid to to regulate the economy has mandated that some imported items will be unable to access forex in the Nigerian Foreign Exchange Markets and have made a list of 41 items that fall into this category.
What this basically means is that those who deal in these items will no longer be able to purchase foreign currency from the official window to pay their foreign suppliers.
Forex will only be available to them from either the parallel market or Bureau De Changes.
This will be their only means to pay for their imports.
This is by no means saying that these items are banned or prohibited, just that they’d be a lot more difficult to procure.
The list includes:
- Rice
- Cement
- Margarine
- Palm kernel/Palm oil
- products/vegetables oils
Meat and processed meat products - Vegetables and processed vegetable products
- Poultry chicken, eggs, turkey
- Private airplanes/jets
- Indian incense
- Tinned fish in sauce(Geisha)/sardines
- Cold rolled steel sheets
- Galvanized steel sheets
- Roofing sheets
- Wheelbarrows
- Head pans
- Metal boxes and containers
- Enamelware
- Steel drums
- Steel pipes
- Wire rods(deformed and not deformed)
- Iron rods and reinforcing bard
- Wire mesh
- Steel nails
- Security and razor wine
- Wood particle boards and panels
- Wood Fibre Boards and Panels
- Plywood boards and panels
- Wooden doors
- Toothpicks
- Glass and Glassware
- Kitchen utensils
- Tableware
- Tiles-vitrified and ceramic
- Textiles
- Woven fabrics
- Clothes
- Plastic and rubber products, polypropylene granules , cellophane wrappers
- Soap and cosmetics
- Tomatoes/tomato pastes
- Eurobond/foreign currency bond/ share purchases