By Adeola Tukuru Abuja
Th e federal government through the National Sugar Development Council (NSDC) yesterday warned that any operator that fails to achieve the performance target on its Backward Integration Programme (BIP) commitments, as released by the Joint Harmonisation meeting, shall be penalized. In a statement signed by the Executive Secretary NSDC, Dr Latif Busari, at the end of the NSMP Mid Term Review meeting, added that the government has also introduced new guidelines and benchmarks for raw sugar allocation to operators of the BIP. According to him, the new guidelines and benchmarks introduced by government, operators will be required to submit their requests for quota sugar allocation for the following year in December of the preceding year.
He said scores by operators shall be in percentages and an operator shall be allocated the exact percentage of its score in the year’s projected allocation. “Th ere will also be sanctions for quota infringement by any of the BIP operators. Any operator that abuses the allocated quota through excess importation shall pay for the excess sugar importation calculated on the extant tariff indicated in the NSMP, for that period or year and not at the concessionary tariff . “Erring operator must pay the duty penalty for excess importation before it can be allowed by the Nigerian Customs Service to discharge its raw sugar cargo,” he said. He further explained that year 2017 allocation shall be the last in which sugar allocation shall be based on the old criteria including market/ share refi nery capacity. “As from 2018 and henceforth, allocation shall be strictly based on quantitatively verifi ed improvement in performance. “SURMIC (Sugar Roadmap Implementation Committee) and SIMOG (Sugar Industry Monitoring Group) are expected to conduct quarterly monitoring of all BIP project
“Outcome of each monitoring exercise will be forwarded to all operators with copies sent to the NSDC and the Offi ce of the Minister, Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investment. Busari also noted that the Government has also realized that the bane of the current strategy is that past quota allocation has not been strictly based on BIP performance and the incentive has not been eff ectively utilised in getting operators to improve performance in their BIP implementation
