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Gbeminiyi Ogunleye
1 month ago
Overview
Hardship: Nigerian-Used Car Market Booms As More Owners Sell Off Private Vehicle «
Soaring living costs, high exchange rates, and rising import tariffs are pushing foreign-used cars out of reach for many Nigerians, with Nigerian-used cars becoming the popular option.
This trend, Saturday PUNCH has learned, is fuelling a boom in the Nigerian-used cars market as more buyers turn to locally pre-owned vehicles for affordability.
Findings by Saturday PUNCH revealed a sharp increase in vehicle listings by private owners, particularly on online marketplaces, social media platforms, and roadside car lots.
This is even as car dealers lamented the rising costs and falling demand for imported vehicles.
According to them, while foreign-used vehicles, popularly known as Tokunbo, remain popular, their prices have doubled or even tripled in the past year due to the depreciating naira and heavy import charges.
The development comes amid a significant decline in the volume of imported vehicles, following the introduction new four per cent Free On Board levy, which replaced the former one per cent Comprehensive Import Supervision Scheme charge.
The Nigerian Customs Service had earlier announced that the new levy was enshrined in the Customs Act 2023 and would serve as a major funding source for its operations, including the deployment of the B’Odogwu cargo clearance system.
NCS’s Comptroller-General, Adewale Adeniyi, said the transition from the CISS to the FOB levy was aimed at modernising the service and reducing clearance bottlenecks.
“The one per cent CISS has served the country for decades,” Adeniyi said at a recent stakeholder forum in Lagos. “But as we embrace digitisation and indigenous technology like the B’Odogwu platform, the Customs must find sustainable ways to fund these transformations.”
