Kebbi State Command of the Nigeria Customs Service has again impounded a truckload of dry donkey meat valued at N200 million while being conveyed to Onitsha in Anambra.
The Forward News learnt that the dry meat cargo was being conveyed to the popular Ochanja Market in Onitsha when customs operatives impounded the cargo on the Koko-Zuru highway in Kebbi.
The recurring seizures of truckloads of dry meat in some states of the federation are said to be threatening the livelihoods of thousands of Nigerians engaged in the trade nationwide.
It was learnt that the customs operatives, who impounded the latest meat cargo refused to listen to pleas of the traders when the traders could not meet their financial demands to release the goods.
The National President of the Donkey Dealers Association of Nigeria, Mr Ikechukwu Aniude, who confirmed the development in Abuja told NAN that the customs operatives seized the meat cargo on May 19.
He said that the operatives were led by an officer whose name he gave simply as Mr Sanusi, recalling that a similar seizure was made by the customs command in Kebbi on March 8 last year.
Aniude lamented what he described as the endless clampdown on traders dealing in donkey business, saying that the business was providing daily bread for more than three million Nigerian households.
He recalled that the traders had similarly lost goods valued at more than N200 million last year when their meat cargo was impounded by the same Kebbi State Command of the Nigeria Customs Service.
“More cows are slaughtered in Nigeria daily, compared to the number of donkeys being slaughtered from day to day in our country.
Seizing goods belonging to donkey dealers by the Kebbi State Command of the Nigeria Customs Service is the height of man’s inhumanity to man at a time like now in Nigeria.
“The operatives of the command failed to realise that our business has been giving daily bread to a cross-section of Nigerians north and south for more than half a century.
“We plead with the Federal Government to please step in and end the unwarranted onslaught on donkey traders by the Kebbi State Command of the Nigeria Customs Service in particular,” Aniude said.
On July 25 last year, the Senate Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development held a public hearing on the issue of people engaging in the slaughtering of donkeys as a business, especially exporting the skin of the animal to China.
But some analysts have criticized what they described as the unwarranted clampdown, arguing that there was nothing wrong with people engaging in donkey trading to make their living.
