A maritime practitioner, Dr. Obiora Madu, has charged the government to mandate some vehicle manufacturing companies like Toyota, Honda, amongst others to set up a vehicle assembly plant in the country.
The Chief Executive Officer, CEO of Mutlimix Academy, said this last week in an interview with Shipping Position Daily in Lagos.
He also said that setting up of the plant in Nigeria; it will go a long way to checkmate the high prices of such vehicles in the country.
He reiterated that it is not about blocking vehicles coming into the country through the land borders, but about making policies that will encourage local manufacturing of vehicles.
Obiora, added that setting up a plant will also create employment for many Nigerians.
“If you go to East Africa you will find out that the Toyota mode of operations is different from that of the West Africa. If the government insists that Toyota, Honda and all these major cars that we drive should set up a plant in Nigeria, they will and over time their prices will come down. Because first of all we have cheap labour here, electronics that are selling Televisions bring in CKDs and assemble them here, Dangote and Chinese companies are also assembling trucks here. So it is not about blocking Tokunbo and all that. In those days Beetles was N2000 and likewise Peugeot. But today you have to get a job before looking for a car. We need a comprehensive look at everything”
He also advised the government to ensure that before they ban anything, they should be a way of replacing that.
“If you want to ban something, you ensure you have a replacement and local capacity for such things. We have a situation where people will go and tell the government we are producing, so we have to ban and when they ban there will be scarcity of such things”, he concluded.
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