The management of the National Union of Food, Beverage, and Tobacco Employees, NUFBTE, has urged the House of Representatives to withhold concurrence on Customs, Excise Tariffs, Etc. (Consolidation) Amendment Bill, 2025 (CETA Bill), is at present earlier than the chamber.
In an open letter addressed to the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Abbas Tajudeen, which was co-signed by the President, NUFBTE, Comrade Garba Dankama, the union warned that passing such laws at the moment would place a further burden on Nigerian staff and the manufacturing sector, given the impression of ongoing financial reforms on their shoulders.
The 2025 CETA Bill proposes changing the predictable ₦ 10-per-litre particular tax on tender drinks with a share levy per litre on the retail worth of the merchandise.
Dankama stated Nigerian staff can’t survive a further, poorly designed tax burden, warning that the proposed laws might flip an already troublesome working setting right into a catastrophic one for the sector.
He defined that with the manufacturing sector, and the meals, beverage, and tobacco sectors in a state of acute misery, passing the CETA Bill would inflict irreversible harm to an already fragile industrial base and threaten the livelihood of staff who rely upon it.
“Capacity utilization across manufacturing has declined sharply as producers contend with prohibitively high borrowing costs, rising energy and logistics expenses, persistent constraints in foreign exchange access, and weakened consumer purchasing power. Several production lines have been scaled back or shut down entirely. The NAD sector, which anchors hundreds of thousands of jobs across farming, haulage, distribution, and retail, cannot absorb an additional tax escalation without triggering a wave of further closures, retrenchments, and value chain collapse,” he said.
