Building on the back of our recent sporting successes, it is time for the government to set industrial targets too. Whether we like it or not, Nigeria needs to dramatically expand productivity. Let us start with these 2026 manufacturing targets

Ayo Akinfe

[1] 10m tonnes of steel

[2] 20m pre-paid electricity metres

[3] 5m electricity transformers

[4] 20m mobile phone handsets

[5] 2m automobiles must be assembled locally

[6] 10m flatscreen TV sets

[7] 10m tonnes of maize

[8] 5m tonnes of sugar

[9] 10 tonnes of rice

[10] 50m pairs of footwear

[11] 1,000 railway carriages

[12] 20bn kg of milk

[13] 2m tonnes of beef

[14] 1bn square feet of leather goods

[15] 5m bicycles

[16] 2m motorcycles

[17] 10m generator sets

[18] 10m tonnes of tomatoes

[19] 10m fridge/freezers

[20] 10bn metres of fabric cloth

[1] It appears that the penny has not yet dropped and Nigerians are oblivious to the fact that they no longer have the foreign exchange to imports goods as used to be the case

[2] With crude oil prices and demand dropping, federal government revenue has about halved

[3] When you no longer have the foreign exchange to import goods, you have no choice but to produce them locally

[4] Everywhere else in the world, you have an industrial bourgeois class who run factories that produce goods for internal consumption and export

[5] Unfortunately, in Nigeria, most of the millionaires are either importers, government contractors or owners of oil blocs. To get out of this rut, this simply has to change

[6] For me, Innocent Chukwuma is the one notable exception in Nigeria, as he alone has shown the capacity to mass produce industrial goods

[7] In Russia, Vladimir Putin has managed to force his oligarchs to step up production and unless Nigeria does likewise, we are heading for Armageddon.

[8] Just take railway carriages for instance. We desperately need local factories to manufacture them. If we do, whenever we have breakdowns we can replace these carriages within a week but now, we have to wait for fresh supplies from China at exorbitant costs

[9] Likewise, it will take months of negotiations and then years of production to get foreign suppliers to deliver to Nigeria attack helicopters to take on Boko Haram. If we manufactured such hardware locally, we could get them delivered with 30 days

[10] Were I in President Tinubu's shoes, I would summon the likes of Dangote, Otedula, Adenuga, Alakija, Chukwuma, Onyeama, etc to aso Rock and tell them we need to initiate an ambitious emergency production programme within weeks. I would give them all the support they need to step up production as they need to build new plants, import equipment, get industrial estates up and running and hire staff to run their plants.

ayoakinfe@gmail.com