Airless tyres present Nigeria with a great opportunity to kill three birds with one stone

By Ayo Akinfe 

(1) If you were to conduct a poll of Nigerians today and ask them the three main issues bugging them the most, your answers would probably be security, unemployment and power supply. It appears that our governments at state and federal level are at a loss about how to tackle these three problems . They simply cannot come up with a roadmap that will attract the necessary investment to banish these woes 

(2) What I find hard to fathom is that nobody has figured out that the three problems are inter-related and a coordinated vertically integrated solution can solve all of them in one go. Create jobs in the power industry and you will create employment for our army of unemployed and also open up opportunities for our youth who have no options in life but to resort to crime to earn a living 

(3) Most Nigerians appears to be of the view that the federal government has the cash in its vaults to solve all these problems in one go. That fallacy is at the heart of our problems, as until we accept that Nigeria currently lacks the capital for industrial development, we will not begin to solve our woes. When our 2019 budget is just $24bn I ask how we will invest in infrastructure and industry. Of this $24bn figure, only about $9m can go into infrastructural projects like power plants, roads, railway lines, etc, which is wholly inadequate. A Lagos to Abuja high speed rail link alone will cost $20bn

(4) Just to put everything into perspective, Aliko Dangote is investing $16bn in his new Lekki refinery. When one project costs $16bn and the federal government has just $9bn to spend for the entire country on infrastructure, you can see we are in deep trouble. So far, no one has come up with suggestions about how we raise the necessary capital to invest in our infrastructure. I have repeatedly said we need to tap into the opportunities Christian and Islamic finance offer but alas, nobody is doing anything about it 

(5) Personally, I would like to see us pass a bill in the National Assembly compelling each and every state governor to submit annual economic blueprints that detail how much he is planning to attract in both domestic and foreign direct investment, what his diversification plans are and what incentives are being introduced to attract start-ups and create jobs. It is our states that hold the key to economic development

(6) It is utopian to think that the federal government can soak up all the unemployed. We need innovative ideas that are new and radical. With our power crisis, there are actually a lot of openings as the green economy and clean energy provides unprecedented opportunities 

(7) Here is one example. General Motors and Michelin have teamed up to manufacture an airless tyre that will be mass produced by 2024. This is the kind of opportunity Nigeria should seize on. Invite these companies to come and open plants in Nigeria and make the country the global manufacturing hub for this new technology. Our labour costs are among the cheapest in the world, so we should be using that as a bargaining chip 

(8) Airless tyres are made from fibreglass, which we could easily mass produce from petroleum. A gigantic petrochemical plant in Bonny could produce enough fibreglass to make us the world’s leading manufacturer of airless tyres. We have the workforce and everything else needed for such a venture. A petrochemical factory will also generate its own power through an adjacent gas-powered plant. So we would be creating jobs, providing power and getting our youths off the street in one go 

(9) With the drive towards clean energy, I am not surprised that the automobile industry is moving away from conventional rubber tyres as they are clearly not environmentally friendly. This presents another opportunity in itself. Have we considered turning Nigeria into the world’s largest tyre recycling economy? Just imagine if we imported used tyres from all over the world and recycled them into energy through a dedicated plant at either Lekki, Bonny, Warri or Port Harcourt

(10) Until we get it into our collective heads that it is innovative thinking like this that will get us out of our economic rut, we are going nowhere. My people need to abandon the thought that the Central Bank of Nigeria governor has a dollar mint in his garden and can print $100bn overnight for President Buhari to invest in infrastructure. It is the ideas of the Nigerian masses that will liberate the country from poverty not any magical wand which the president waves

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