VP Osinbajo Meets With Delegates From Manufacturers Association of Nigeria

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NIGERIA A HUGE MARKET FOR LOCALLY MANUFACTURED GOODS – VP OSINBAJO

 *FG to ensure Nigeria is self-sufficient in tomato production by end of 2018

 REMARKS BY HIS EXCELLENCY, PROF. YEMI OSINBAJO, SAN, GCON, THE VICE PRESIDENT, FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF NIGERIA, DURING THE VISIT OF THE MANUFACTURERS ASSOCIATION OF NIGERIA TO THE PRESIDENTIAL VILLA, ABUJA, ON THURSDAY, 05 OCTOBER, 2017

PROTOCOL

I must thank you for your very active collaboration with us in the whole Made-in-Nigeria policy implementation. And I think that this particular exercise is one that clearly demonstrates the kind of participation that we expect from the private sector in implementing the ideas and, in many cases, ideas that are not just government ideas, but ideas that we put together at some point or the other.

I have attended several events either hosted by the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria or some of the other organised private sector groups and this whole Made-in-Nigeria issue is the one that came up and it’s not, therefore, original.

It is not the concept that came out of the Executive Order. The whole point of the Executive Order was to set the ball rolling, to create the environment for this sort of initiative and I’m really pleased and extremely grateful to you for the work that you have done in bringing this to the fore.

Just listening to the issues that you raise, I think these are very, very important issues. I believe that they are practical, they are also very possible, and they are entirely doable. I don’t think there is any suggestion you have made, in term of policy that is outrageous or difficult in implementing anyway. As a matter of fact, I think that we will go ahead to do most of what has been suggested. Getting a margin of reference for Made-in-Nigeria goods; it is an expression I am not particularly familiar with.  But it just describes what we are trying to achieve, namely, we should say that, in certain sectors, certain government practices should meet a certain threshold.  I think, in this particular case, the 35 per cent threshold that you proposed is entirely reasonable. I think we should do better than that in terms of driving government procurement if I can understand you correctly.

One thing is that we always expect that a Made-in-Nigeria product is always very expensive. The question is how much more expensive? But again, a terrible policy of purchasing Made-in-Nigeria takes that into account. The good thing is that we set some kind of percentage which, I think, is very helpful.  We will look at all of these and see to it that the procurement people sit with the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investment.  We will look at it and set into policy and all of that.  But I think it makes plenty of sense.

The point you made is really the reason why we thought an Executive Order required that, especially with respect to textiles and armed forces or non-armed forces, unformed organisations. And I think that this is entirely doable; this is the right thing to do. There is no reason at all why we cannot patronize local textiles.

There is also a very good, fairly large market now, especially for those who are producing boots and shoes for the military. Some of the forces have actually ordered for boots, and for the military, we are trying to make sure that becomes a norm. Hopefully, we will be able to get most of these done.

Aside from that, with respect to smuggling, counterfeit and all that, really it is more of implementation.  I think there are few amendments here and there to be made to the law with respect to penalties. There should be monetary penalties.  Some of the provisions made are so low for monetary penalties that they are really not a deterrent in any way.  We think we can do a lot to that.

More importantly, the whole issue is that we are able to police the borders. Last week we had discussions with all the agencies connected with smuggling, including the Customs, the Minister of Internal Affairs, NPA, and all that, and we are looking at how we can work with our neighbours, especially the Benin Republic, and our neighbours also in the North, to police our borders as much as we can.  There are also places that our borders are quite wide and porous.

But we think that working with them alone with respect to the point that what we are already very familiar with will actually reduce the number of it.  Let me say there is an MOU signed with Benin Republic in 2013 which was meant to effectively res8pond to the high rate of smuggling, especially in rice and poultry product and all that. So after that closure, both countries agreed to a process of supervision of what comes in. Unfortunately, that whole thing never quite worked.

But we are thinking of working with the governments on our border to ensure that this is done for us. It’s really a survival issue, but I think that we are really convinced that the manufacturing sector, the agricultural sector will not be able to survive the spate of smuggling, and simply the fact that people able to bring in these and dump them is another major consideration.  So we are looking at this; we are meeting again next week and we will be able to tackle some of the agreements that we have reached.

I hope you are familiar with tomatoes policy as well. It is, again, designed to ensure that we are able to produce tomatoes locally and we are completely self-sufficient in tomatoes production we hope, by the end of 2018.  We have been speaking with quite a few investors, I mean, international investors.  Yesterday, we had a meeting with some who have been talking about what to do in that area.

Critically is that when you take all these preventive measures to restrict import and all that, it means that local production must be ramped up, otherwise there must be a substitute somewhere.  So we are trying very hard to ensure that things are able to move at a pace as soon as possible so we are not running too far ahead of local capacity.