CBN ‘Removes’ 36 Items From Forex Ban list

The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has reportedly removed 36 sub-items from the list of items banned from accessing forex from its window since 2015.

President of the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN), Frank Udemba-Jacobs, said this in a chat with journalists in Lagos.

MAN had appealed to the Federal Government to review the CBN’s foreign exchange policy, which banned 41 items from accessing forex in the Nigerian Foreign Exchange Market.

MAN explained that most of the items could not be sourced locally.

Jacobs said: “The association has done an analysis on the banned items and we broke the 41 items into 110 and of the 110, 75 are raw materials for our members.

“It is these 75 items that we ask the Federal Government to remove from the list so that our members can source forex to buy their raw materials.

“The 41 items translated to 680 ‘HS codes’ (harmonised System) with only 95 of them as raw materials.

“The CBN through our interventions has removed 36 from the 95.”

The Harmonized System (HS) was created by the Brussels-based World Customs Organization (WCO).

It consists of numerical codes that allow the systematic definition and classification of all goods in international trade, within the tariffs of signatory countries.