The Lagos State Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI) has said that Nigeria is still unripe to be talking about manufacturing vehicles here in Nigeria.
The Director of Research & Advocacy, LCCI Mr. Vincent Nwani, who disclosed this in an interview with Shipping Position Daily in Lagos, last week, also fingered porous borders as one of the major reasons for the failure of the automotive policy.
He called for urgent need to fortify the nation’s porous borders, even as he called for a check on the behavior of officers who are attached to the borders.
“The current automotive policy raises high tariff on already completed cars. Cars such as full knock down parts and all of these policies are meant to encourage local production. But because of our porous borders all of these policies do not see the light of the day. Vehicles still come in without paying the agreed duty. Something needs to happen to our porous borders, the border between Nigeria and the Republic of Benin and our sea borders too. They even need to check the behaviors of the officers at the borders especially customs that allow these things to come in without due papers. But having said that, the major issue is that, are we really ready as a country to manufacture cars, do we have the technology, raw materials, and also the small industries that will help in the manufacturing of these car”.
He said that the country does not have the capacity to manufacture her own vehicles, even as he called on Nigeria as a nation to start with manufacturing of some parts of the vehicles.
“I was in Japan recently and I found out that Toyota alone has about 200 companies across the country were small parts of the car called Toyota are assembled; from the battery to all the nuts. Different parts of the car are made by different subsidiaries of Toyota Company scattered around the country”
We don’t have such capacity here, we don’t have people that can make plug so it is a big problem. Even ordinary tyre we have rubber here but we cannot make tyres. So we are not really ready as a country.”
The plans to establish an assembly plant here is a good one, but we all know that charity begins at home. We need to go back to the drawing board; we need to start the small industries that make the manufacturing of vehicles easy. The cars that we are driving now, we don’t need to buy battery outside the country. There are things we don’t need to buy outside the country; we need to start manufacturing all these things here.
We also need to do something about power because we cannot talk about manufacturing vehicles where we don’t have power, these are the key concerns”, he concluded.
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