NADDC DG Seeks Shift To Nigeria-used Vehicle Market

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The Director General of the National Automotive Design and Development Council (NADDC), Otunba Oluwemimo Joseph Osanipin, has called for the development of a robust domestic used-vehicle market that will reduce Nigeria’s continued dependence on imported used vehicles, popularly known as “tokunbo”.

Osanipin said Nigeria’s used-vehicle market should be built around vehicles originally purchased and used within the country, rather than relying almost exclusively on automobiles discarded or sold off by users in other countries.

The NADDC boss spoke when the Managing Director of The Sun Publishing Company Limited, Mr. Onuoha Ukeh, paid  a courtesy visit to the Council’s headquarters in Abuja recently, accompanied by the Editor of the Daily Sun, Mr. Iheanacho Nwosu.

According to him, used vehicles are not inherently bad, stressing that the real challenge is Nigeria’s dependence on used vehicles imported from other countries, instead of developing an internal market in which vehicles circulate from one owner to another.

He, however, decried a situation where huge foreign exchange goes to the importation of hundreds of thousands of used vehicles – a good number of which are in terrible condition – are imported into the country.

Osanipin also described as a deterrent the prevailing situation where the high  volume of ‘tokunbo’ vehicles outweigh the low number of products from the auto plants in Nigeria.

He painted a picture of what he met on ground upon assumption of duties as the NADDC Director General in October, 2023, saying, “When we came in, we knew that we were facing a lot of challenges in the automobile industry. And we knew that we could not surmount the challenges in the next three, four, five years, or even 10 years.

“But we knew we had to start from somewhere and…