The Nigerian Onion Producers, Processors and Marketers Association of Nigeria (NOPPMAN) has suspended onion exports and called for an urgent roundtable involving the Federal Government, Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and all countries importing Nigerian onions.
NOPPMAN says the idea is to negotiate and sign a binding Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to protect cross-border trade.
The association stressed that the proposed agreement must go beyond the current dispute with Ghana, but cover all countries that import Nigerian onions, insisting that a permanent regional framework was needed to prevent recurring disruptions to the trade.
The President of NOPPMAN, Alhaji Isa Aliyu, made the call while addressing journalists at the onion market in Kara, Sokoto State, disclosing that Nigerian onion exporters had suffered an estimated N1.2 billion loss, following delays and restrictions on the offloading of their consignments at the Kotoku Market in Ghana.
He said the association was no longer interested in repeatedly resolving individual disputes with trading partners, but wanted all stakeholders brought to the negotiating table to establish clear and enforceable rules.
“Our demand is clearly for us to resume onion exportation to any other country, not even Ghana itself. We want to have a kind of permanent solution to this little challenge that is facing cross-border trade in Africa”, Aliyu said.
He proposed that the association and Nigeria at large, should sign an MoU with every country that imports its onions, with the agreements guided by the ECOWAS Trade Liberalisation Scheme (ETLS), African Continental Free Trade Area, and other relevant regional trade instruments.
“We want to have a memorandum of agreement with any country that is coming to buy our onion or any country that we are going to be exporting our onion to”, he insisted.
According to him, the agreement should clearly define rules for market access, movement of trucks, allocation and offloading of consignments, as well as dispute-resolution mechanisms. He also called on ECOWAS to serve as a neutral mediator and observer, stressing that any party that violated the agreement should face sanctions under the relevant instrument.
Aliyu clarified that Ghana is currently the only country where NOPPMAN had encountered the problem. “No, we don’t have any problems in any other country apart from Ghana. It’s only Ghana”, he said.
He explained that the decision to suspend exports to other destinations was a precautionary measure designed to prevent the Ghana experience from being repeated elsewhere.
The NOPPMAN President alleged that Nigerian onion trucks had been subjected to prolonged delays at the Kotoku Market, with consignments reportedly being offloaded at the rate of only two trucks per day, despite the highly perishable nature of onions.
He lamented that the delays had caused some consignments to deteriorate, resulting in heavy financial losses to exporters and transporters.
Aliyu, though, disclosed that the association had engaged authorities in Nigeria and Ghana over the dispute, including during a recent meeting in Ghana, which was attended by government officials, diplomats and other stakeholders.
He alleged that Ghana’s Deputy Minister of Trade, Agribusiness and Industry, Hon. Sampson Ahi, directed traders to offload the affected Nigerian trucks, but that the directive was not fully implemented. “To our greatest surprise, they refused to offload it. They went on with their own restriction of offloading only two per day, when the onion had already been there for almost a week”, Aliyu added.
He stressed that the association’s position was not an attack on Ghana or its traders, but a demand for fair and predictable cross-border trade. “Our concern is not with the people or the traders of Ghana. Nigeria and Ghana have longstanding economic, diplomatic, and people-to-people relations, and we remain committed to peaceful and mutually-beneficial trade between our two countries”, he said.
The NOPPMAN President maintained that the recurring disputes showed that temporary interventions were no longer enough. “We have been going back and forth. This thing has been reoccurring. So for now, we have stopped the trade”, he said.
He added that onion exports would resume once Nigeria, importing countries and regional authorities, agreed on a framework capable of protecting both exporters and importers.
“We want to come up with a framework that is under ETLS or AfCFTA, so that it will protect both the exporters and the importers from the destination countries. Once this is done, we will resume our onion trade”, Aliyu assured.
