Manufacturing policy as roadmap to national economic recovery

The manufacturing sector, as recently featured through the programme organised by the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN) in collaboration with the federal government, at a 3-day “national manufacturing policy summit” that took place in the Villa (Banquet Hall), Abuja from 2nd to 4th July 2024, finally resolved to focus on local manufacturing as the only means expected to change the entire national economic narrative, from an import dependent economy, to the advantage of her citizens in consuming locally manufactured goods of high quality, and competitively low priced. This was planned and proposed with the aim being to add value to the locally outsourced agricultural produce and numerous other natural resources by processing them as locally manufactured finished goods or products. This economic policy of converting local raw materials to finished goods fit for human consumption, and simultaneously conserving our foreign exchange, has been a rhetorically proposed economic strategy constantly discussed under different administrations of government in the country, but was always short on implementation and lack of strict political will to perform them.

This tortuous economic underperformance by the country’s leaders is not only attributable to systemic corruption within, it also has a very weighty correlation with international political interference. The developed economies that take advantage of Africa’s rich natural resources through exploitation and feed fat on the continent, would not freely support, nor truly enhance the economic emancipation of any nation. This is an open secret in international business but they will rather suppress such a rising economy through numerous economic and political stumbling blocks that endlessly entrench economic distractions that prevent growth and development. This is a fact, otherwise most of the nation’s political disputes should not have been in the first place. But they are unreasonably fermented and created through remotely manipulated political influencers who control those internal challenges that manifest lots of political undertones. This latent economic strategy of “pull him down” by the big economies hinder most African countries from developing and growing as they ought to (including Nigeria). Our leaders should shine their eyes and lead the nation right! We cannot survive by continuing like this, as a perpetually consumer nation. 

Nigeria has all it takes (economic potentials, abandoned infrastructural facilities of international standards in the manufacturing sector, like the Ajaokuta steel complex, for instance), to even pull the entire Africa out of this economic doldrums. Just imagine the recently established greenfield Dangote refinery complex (one of the very best in the oil and gas sector, globally), with all it stands to perform, influence and achieve along its allied value chains at the international oil market. Today, stories making rounds revolve around the exploitative provision of our own locally drilled crude oil by the international oil companies (IOCs) as the cabals frustrating the local refineries from adequate supplies of Nigerian crude. Why should President Tinubu or the leaders in authority with the responsibility to do something, not rise to action immediately? Declaring a state of emergency on oil and gas needs to be done as a matter of urgency, until this nagging and shameful matter is resolved in favour of our existing local refineries. Yet, we cry daily of the high cost of every commodity in the country (hyperinflation, where a 50kg bag of rice costs as much as N75,000; while a loaf of bread that used to be sold for N250 now sells for as much as N2,000). More Nigerians are continuously getting impoverished on a daily basis, with the continuous tumbling of our local currency, the naira, at the foreign exchange market. Our national minimum wage issue still remains unresolved between the governments (federal and states) and the labour unions, from the current figure of N30,000 salary per month. The federal government needs to urgently do the needful in this respect.

As the economic strategies of backward integration and import substitution appear the veritable tools that the local investors and the organised private sector (OPS), especially the MAN at this critical stage of our national economy, should leverage on, in the light of the nation’s economic search for survival, the government should seriously work out very effective economic policy on manufacturing that would protect all local manufacturers to favourably compete with their foreign counterparts in both the domestic and foreign markets for all the sectors of the economy; such that backward integration and import substitution become instantly effective and are efficiently implemented. It is a feasible and known pathway that can turn things around for the nation’s economy, allowing it to come alive once again. This is if the government would sincerely show seriousness to make things happen in the daily economic and commercial activities of the country.  

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