The international investment community says it is beginning to interpret the direction of the present administration in terms of industrial policy, especially the two-year-old Nigerian Industrial Revolution Plan (NIRP).
The officer in-charge of the Nigerian regional office of the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO), Chuma Ezedimma, who made the disclosure, said it had to sponsor and host a retreat in Onne, near Port Harcourt, where all agencies of government in the area of industry, trade and investment had to participate to read the mind of the Muhammadu Buhari administration.
He said: “We are actually hosting the retreat. We in UNIDO want to see the focus of the Nigerian economy in the next four years. We partner with governments and institutions that are interested in developing their economies, especially in non-oil sector. We in UNIDO are very keen in that sector. We have been in Nigeria for 35 years and we have been trying to convince Nigeria that we should move to non-oil sector. We have been able to justify our position especially with the fall in oil prices to convince Nigeria in that direction.”
Asked at what point would UNIDO achieve the task of understanding where the country was heading to, the regional boss said: “At the end of this retreat we will know. In fact, we already know. There are four pillars and at least three of them are very interesting to us. We will try support in those three areas.”
Explaining, he said: “We became active in this particular workshop because we wanted to know the direction in which the government wants to focus its economy. Fortunately, many of the things the federal wants to do align with our mandates; providing enabling environment for businesses to thrive, focusing on implementing the National Industrial revolution Plan (NIRP), looking at development of SMEs, and catalysing an enabling environment for investment, trade and industry. These are areas UNIDO works on.”
He went on: “If you look at the NIRP specific, we were also part of the development of the plan and UNIDO had also started sourcing for funds to help Nigeria set up the enablers of industrial acceleration such as standardisation, etc. We do have Standards Organisation of Nigeria (SON), and its not that we do not have standards in Nigeria but they are not linked internationally. We do not even have standardisation and testing laboratories for exports except for oil sector. We need it in non-oil, what we call conformity assessment bodies. These are areas of opportunity for the private sector to even set then up.”
Ezedimma noted that Nigeria did not have a metrology system and thus, an exporter cannot say this pen is the same thing you find in Germany. “You have to have a referencing point in anything you want to export in terms of volume, temperature, density, all those measurement issues. These are the kinds of things we want to build for the country in terms of enabling environment”.
He went on: “We are building on another enabler called skills, industrial skills. There is also energy, infrastructure, innovation, etc.”
On skills, he said they were looking to industrial skills. “If you want to develop your industrial sector, you have to develop the skills that will man it. Industrial skills have gone digital while our education method is still analogue. So, our graduates cannot move into the industry that they were trained for. Two things now happen; they now do an aptitude test and pick trainable ones and train them for over a year. Or, employ from abroad. So, basically, you find increasing unemployment due to this factor”.
In the area of renewable energy, he said Nigeria can use this for productive industrial activities and that UNIDO has tested this in this country. “You can use renewable energy to run small industries, small hydro power, solar, etc, to run some industries. We also have bio-mass which is beginning to get a lot of attention and interest. In Nigeria, it is the best way to clean up our environment. All the waste you see in the cities is an opportunity to create wealth; collect the waste, put it in a machine, churn out fertilizer on one hand and gas on the other hand to power your facility. These are all part of the enablers in the NIRP.”
Sector wise, he said UNIDO was supporting SMEs in leather and belts, because anyone who can make leather or shoes is made for life. “That is why we are supporting the Federal Government to push forward the industrial sector.”
He said the ‘Ease of Doing Business’ was a sector they were supporting not because they wanted to invest in it but for investors they bring from abroad. “We have in investment and promotion office, the first in Africa, and this is linked to another 80 investment/technology centres in the western world.”
He added: “What we do is to draw down people who are interested in investing in Nigeria to come and invest. We have people sitting there who want to invest in Nigeria but they do not even sure how to do it. Ours is proactive action; hold your hand, bring you in, show you what is on ground, and if you want to invest, you invest. We can also hold your hand, bring you in with your technology. We tried to host this retreat because we want to see the Federal Government’s direction so we now bring in our capacity to help.”
