Jibrin Abubakar and Ahmed Mohammed
16 July 2008
interview
Abuja — Alhaji Sanusi Maijama'a is the National President of Small Scale Industrialists (NASSI),a group that promotes the growth of small businesses and entrepreneurs in Nigeria .
In this interview Alhaji Maijama'a speaks on its effort to attract foreign investors and the challenges inherent in the revival of the small scale industrial sector.
What is Nigeria's policy on small and medium scale industries?
Since the creation of Nigeria it did not have any policy on small scale Industry. We have policies on commerce, education and health care but not on small scale industries, except recently with the coming of Umaru Musa Yar'adua administration. Former President Obasanjo gave all his support to SMEDAN. We gathered all the stakeholders in the small scale industries with the support of UNDP in collaboration with SMEDAN and worked tirelessly to come out with a complete policy on SME. Despite all odds, we now have a complete national policy on SME for the first time in the history of Nigeria, but the problem is how the policy can work.
Recently, the Federal Government came out with a policy which says all commercial banks should contribute 10% of their annual profits to the development of industries in Nigeria. Does this programme work?
I know what you are talking about. It's SMEs. The SMEs was started during the Obasanjo administration. The scheme was new in the whole world and no country has ever tried it. It started in Nigeria. I was a member of the presidential advisory board and we had very well advised Obasanjo on the programme. Obasanjo initiated the programme because when he took power in 1999, the government was faced with the serious problems of unemployment in Nigeria. That was how it introduced the programme with the aim of helping them to reduce unemployment, but when this government came, the programme went through a lot of modification which elaborates its activities and makes it very wide. The government felt it has to modify the programme. The government which initiated it is no longer there and most of the stakeholders who started the programme have retired, some have been posted some where on national assignment while some even quit. The programme is targetted on entrepreneurs and when it came for the first time, Nigerians rejected it. We had to go to all nooks and crannies of the country to enlighten the public and gradually some Nigerians accepted it.
With the current government monetary policy, it changed the name to Micro Credit Funds. I don't know whether they made it public but all the plans are the same and the current Central Bank governor is very much interested in the programme. He announced that they had set aside N50billion for the Micro Credit Funds scheme and the money contributed from the Banks before was 10% before tax but I told you the programme went through a lot of modifications and there is disagreement between the commercial banks and the CBN where the banks argued that it is supposed to be 10% after tax they would contribute. So the CBN agreed now that the Banks pay 10% after tax. That is the new change. The CBN governor said the N50billion micro credit scheme is a replacement of SMES. That is what he said at a forum and now they want the money to go into micro development, but if they go with the programme the way he said it, there would be serious problem, because state governments would contribute 30% of the amount to be given for the micro development. You know we depositors in the commercial banks, it is our dividends that were set aside as contribution to the development of the scheme.
That is what generates the 10% money if states would come in. For example, if you inject N70million and the state would contribute N30million, the states will ignore the public funds that generate this N70 million. Rather with its N30m, it will take over the control of the funds and disburse it the way they want because by the time states take over, politics will come, monopoly will come and you may end up leaving the target people who are the real small scale industrialists. Rather, the government should release the funds to the associations to disburse because they know the true small scale industrialist they are with. When I told the CBN governor this observation, he reasoned with me and promised to look into it and pledged that we will discuss the issue in another forum that will be organized soon.
Power problem is a major problem to the development of industries in Nigeria. What is your take on this?
Power is everybody's problem in Nigeria. I support the effort of President Umaru Musa Yar'adua when he said he will declare a state of emergency in the energy sector. I pray it will work. If not, all the industries in Nigeria will be crippled and it would affect our economy seriously since crippling of the industries will damage the economy of the country and increase the rate of unemployment and bring untold hardship to Nigerians.
On export, government has a document on that but the problem is that our people rely heavily on foreign goods and there are certain factors that led to that which include high cost of labour, lack of electricity, and the standard, in fact for Nigeria to produce goods for export is a challenge to the entire private sector in the country especially the organized private sector like MAN, NACCIMA, NASSI, and many others all of whom agreed to sit down together and look at the way forward and how we can work together to address these problems. But after we sat down , we only agreed that the mentality of Nigerians on foreign goods needs a lot of review and so we also agreed to work with some UBA, ECOBank and economic investment company. We set a target that we want to see how we can export some Made in Nigeria goods that will be acceptable to the communities within the West African sub-region.
We went to some countries like: Burkina Faso and Liberia within the region and opened windows there for made -in-Nigeria goods, we opened a warehouse in Nigeria, Liberia, and Burkina Faso and market our products for them and opened a business window between Nigeria and these two countries. By 15th July (yesterday), our first consignment of goods must have been exported to Liberia because we have qualitative made- in-Nigeria goods that meet the standard required, and we are working with NAFDAC and the Standard Organization of Nigeria (SON) to make sure that all our products match their standard and in NASSI we advised our people to meet these standards. You know we are doing our best to formalize the sector hopefully everything will succeed.
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