Inadequate infrastructure is the major challenge faced by Nigerian manufacturing sector, observes Oranu Chris Chidume, group managing director, KRISORAL Group of Companies.
Chidume, in an exclusive interview with BusinessDay in Onitsha, Anambra State, insisted that a good entrepreneur could source his funds if adequate infrastructure was put in place.
According to him, so many banks are ready to finance projects, but because of poor infrastructure, the man that is lending money is always conscious of the risk factors.
He described manufacturing as the catalyst to the economic development of Nigeria and urged governments at the centre and in the states to support the real sector to get the country out of its present economic doldrums.
He decried the electricity challenge in the country, which has crippled so many manufacturing firms and advised the National Electricity Regulatory Commission, the electricity regulatory agency in Nigeria, to wield the big stick on the electricity generation and distribution companies (GENCOs and DISCOs) whenever they default.
According to him, “regulation without teeth is as good as nothing, and until you have a strong regulation that can bite, people will continue to circumvent laws. If you run your sector in such a way that it undermines our overall goal, you should be sanctioned.
“But because of the fact that we were still surviving on oil, our people have not realized the true meaning of manufacturing. And because of that, manufacturers beg for support and attention, which ordinarily they are supposed to get by default.
“For instance, we rely more on generator to power our plant, just because somebody somewhere does not agree with you on the need to provide all the utilities and infrastructure that are required for manufacturing and as such, he can be playing around it.
“Don’t be surprised that if you go to the DISCOs of GENCOs now, what they will be seeing as a problem could be negligible. It could be something someone can just wake up and solve, but because of bureaucracy, because he has not keyed into the need of that thing he is doing, as it concerns our general productivity, he can afford to play around it and that is the number one major factor that discourages manufacturing.”
Nigeria has enormous capacity that can serve West Africa, he said, but however regretted that those capacities had not been tapped due to heavy dependence on imported goods, especially from Asia, saying that it is easier to import products from China to Ghana than importing from Nigeria.
