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Price of foodstuffs to go up in Tunisia following protests by farmers

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The Tunisia government says it will raise the prices of basic foods items like milk, eggs and poultry following days of protests by farmers against a rise in the price of barley and animal feed due to the war in Ukraine and an increase in energy costs.

The announcement was made on Wednesday morning by Agriculture Minister Mahmoud Elyess Hamza who said the price increase is likely to take effect as early as Thursday.

“We will announce on Thursday May 12 a price review for eggs, poultry and milk to ensure the profit margin for producers.

“The Tunisian consumer must support the Tunisian farmer, because the farmer is a pillar of Tunisian food security in this delicate situation around the world,” Hamza said.

The farmers began the nationwide protests on Monday and in several areas, lamented the high cost of animal feed, with some cutting roads, while others poured milk in the streets and threatened to cut production.

The North African country which has been in a deep financial crisis in the past two years, has been badly hit by a rise in global wheat prices resulting from the Russian war in Ukraine.

The Economy Minister Samir Saied had in March, attributed the impact of wheat and oil price rises on Tunisia’s budget saying it will be slightly less than about $1.7 billion this year.

Trade unions officials had last week, warned that the wave of repeated price increases and a fall in purchasing power amid a severe economic crisis could lead to protests the authorities may not be able to control.

Last month, the government raised the price of fuel by 5%, making it the third hike this year, with the energy ministry saying the country will raise local fuel prices every month this year by no less than three percent, which may mean an increase of at least 30 percent by the end of 2022.

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Kenya, Uganda settle oil import dispute

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In an effort to patch things up between the two neighbours, Kenya will permit Uganda’s landlocked state oil company to import petroleum products through its port of Mombasa, the country’s energy ministry said on Thursday.

After decades of receiving their cargo through affiliated firms in Kenya, Uganda has been looking for alternative ways to import petroleum products, including through a port in Tanzania. According to Solomon Muyita, a spokesman for Uganda’s ministry of minerals and energy, the first shipment under the new arrangement is scheduled for May.

“Kenya has agreed to give us a licence, UNOC (Uganda National Oil Company) is now free to import through Mombasa,” he said.

According to reports, UNOC would use the Kenya Pipeline Company to transport the goods, so Kenya would still profit from the agreement, according to Kenyan Energy Minister Davis Chirchir.

In 2022, Uganda imported petroleum products valued at $1.6 billion, the majority of which came from the Gulf. Kenya serves as the import gateway for about 90% of the goods.

It declared in November that it would transfer all exclusive petroleum product supply rights to a division of the international energy trader Vitol, which would subsequently supply UNOC.

According to what the government said at the time, using Kenyan companies to import oil had “exposed Uganda to occasional supply vulnerabilities” whereby Ugandan retail companies were viewed as secondary whenever there were supply disruptions changing retail prices.

The two African nations that make up the Great Lakes are partners in a variety of fields, including trade, infrastructure, energy, education, agriculture, and military security.

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No plan to increase taxes, Nigeria’s revenue chief says

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The head of Nigeria’s revenue agency, Zacch Adedeji, has reaffirmed that there is no plan for the introduction of new taxes in the country.

Adedeji, who is the Chairman of the Federal Inland Revenue, made the position known when the Chief Executive Officer of Guinness Nigeria Plc, Adebayo Alli, led the management team of the company on a visit to the Revenue House in Abuja.

He was quoted as saying, “the President gave a directive that he wants a single digit tax in the country, meaning that the maximum number of taxes we will have after the work of the Presidential Committee on Fiscal Policy and Tax Reforms will be nine taxes,” in a statement signed by the Special Adviser on Media to the FIRS chairman, Dare Adekanmbi.

“For us at FIRS, we have responded to that directive. We want to grow the pie such that even if we are taking the same percentage of the bigger pie, the result will be huge.

“By God’s grace, we will not introduce additional taxes nor increase any form of tax. We are only determined to increase the pie. We have restructured our operations at FIRS in such a way that we are now effectively carrying out our duty of assessing, collecting and accounting for taxes. We used to have functional types of taxes, but we have identified that the only customers we have are the taxpayers.”

He stated that by restructuring “our operations based on our customers, using their turnover as the basis to categorise them into large, medium, and small,” FIRS has enhanced its customer relations. He continued by saying that President Bola Tinubu wanted to increase Nigerians’ purchasing power in order to promote growth and increase businesses’ capacity for productivity through the recently implemented consumer credit scheme.

The Nigerian government has been working to overhaul the nation’s monetary and fiscal policies since the start of the Bola Tinubu administration. This has resulted in the central bank and the Oyedele-led tax advisory council implementing daring new policies.

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