Nigeria needs to rethink its global competitive strategy – Kale

Yemi Kale, chief economist and head of research at KPMG Nigeria, a professional consulting firm has said Nigeria needs to rethink its global competitive strategy in order not to be left behind as other countries reposition for higher value manufacturing.

He acknowledged on his Twitter handle on Sunday, the need to compete globally but that the world is constantly evolving.

“Countries are constantly creating new things or looking for newer ways to do things more efficiently & remain competitive. Constantly in a “mad race” to increase value and utility,” he tweeted.

“One challenge we have is that often, we are still struggling to do things the way it was successfully done by other countries in the past. Why do we try to implement what they did then, many have moved past that to something better keeping us perpetually playing catch up,” he added.

The KPMG partner explained that this might arguably be why for the most part most of our many past and present development plans and strategies are almost identical, saying mostly the same things. “Many of which are probably even outdated and might have limited success allowing us to compete globally today.”

The former chief executive officer of the National Bureau of Statistics, said we often advocate boosting manufacturing in Nigeria re exports etc and that global production value is changing such that the higher value in firms value chain nowadays is more from the frontend (technology, patents etc) & backend (Marketing/sales) 1/3 & less from actual production 1/3.

“Less of the economic gain is coming from the middle phase which is the actual production itself the country always focuses on. Where does this leave us re our growth& development strategy going forward? What lessons should we learn now as the World keeps evolving?,” he said.

Kale recommends that there is clearly the need to ramp support and boost manufacturing and that it is very important that simultaneously we pay attention to research & development & technology in the overall manufacturing process as well as more efficient branding/marketing/sales approaches to compete.