The Executive Secretary of the National Sugar Development Council (NSDC), Kamar Bakrin, has said Nigeria must cutdown the high cost of producing goods or risk losing domestic and African markets to more competitive economies.
Speaking at the just concluded technical session of the 17th National Council on Industry, Trade and Investment (NCITI) in Enugu, Bakrin said Nigerian manufacturers were burdened by significantly higher costs for electricity, financing and logistics than their counterparts in countries such as Vietnam and China.
He told delegates that while factories in Vietnam and China paid between 8 and 10 US cents per kilowatt-hour for electricity, Nigerian manufacturers often paid up to 30 cents once diesel generation was factored in.
He noted that manufacturers spent an estimated ₦1.34 trillion last year generating their own electricity.
“Every factory in Nigeria is running a second, unwanted business as a private power station,” he said.
Bakrin also highlighted the cost of finance, saying manufacturers in Nigeria faced lending rates of between 27 and 35 per cent, compared with about 9 per cent in Vietnam and 3 per cent in China.
He added that Nigeria ranked 88th out of 139 countries on the World Bank’s Logistics Performance Index, behind Vietnam and China.
According to him, these structural costs—not a lack of demand—remain the biggest obstacle to industrial growth.
“Nobody on this continent needs persuading to buy what Nigeria makes. It is a cost-of-production problem, and that distinction matters because costs, unlike demand, are within our power to fix,” Bakrin said.
He argued that recent macroeconomic reforms had created a more stable environment for investment, citing lower inflation and foreign reserves of about US$51 billion, while warning that Nigeria must seize the opportunity created by shifting global supply chains and the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).
“Either our goods are crossing borders going out, or everyone else’s goods are crossing ours coming in. We are either going to compete, or we are going to concede the market,” he said.
Bakrin pointed to Nigeria’s fertiliser industry as evidence that industrial transformation was possible, noting that urea production capacity had expanded from about 500,000 tonnes in 2005 to 6.5 million tonnes, making the country one of the world’s leading exporters of nitrogen fertiliser.
