The Chairman of BUA Cement, Alh. Abdul Samad Rabiu, has recounted how cement dealers frustrated his company’s N3, 500/bag policy, last year.

He spoke at the 8th Annual General Meeting of the company in Abuja, this afternoon.

I’ll draw 1,000 faces of people making positive impact — Ebunoluwa, 9-Yr-Old wonderkid..0:00 / 1:00

He said that while his company sold over a million tones of cement to dealers at N3, 500, per bag, with the intention that they would pass the benefits to end-users, the dealers sold a bag of cement consumers at as high as N7000 and N8,000.

A ton is equal to 20 bags of 50 kg weight.

He said the company had to discontinue the policy as its intervention was not to subsidise dealers.

According to him, BUA Cement could not stop the dealers whom he said made huge profits from the high margin because the company had no control over prices in the open market.

He added that the Naira devaluation last year and the fuel subsidy removal also played roles in making the policy unsustainable.

Alh Rabiu said, “We were selling cement at N3,500 with the expectation that the dealers and the retailers would pass the benefits of the low price to the end-user customers.

“It’s such that whatever price you sell cement at, you pay. It doesn’t matter what happens if the price doubles or triples if it’s less than that. So, we didn’t actually have that price.