MAN urges FG to promote incentives in driving manufacturing growth

The Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN) has called on the federal government to help drive growth in the manufacturing sector by ensuring that incentives, intervention programs and policies are broad enough to cover all sector payers, particularly those with linking activities.

Mansur Ahmed, president, MAN said this at the 6th edition of the MAN reporter of the year award and presidential media luncheon, where he noted that although the government and its agencies are making efforts to improve economic and commercial activities for businesses through the provision of intervention funds, enabling policies, etc. This, he said, will have minimal impact if such efforts are restricted to specific sub-sectors or businesses.

“Sometimes incentives don’t work if they are not all-encompassing for example, the CBN introduced the Cotton, Textile and Garment (CTG) intervention for cotton growers but this has limited impact because that intervention was not really extended to manufacturers, hence the cotton was grown but there is little or no value for it,” he said.

Mansur added that the textile manufacturing, garment and apparel making subsector and other related sectors are closely linked and when key sectors work together that is the only way the much-anticipated improvement in the whole sector.

“Our hope is we will continue to have interventions in each subsector reaching the various participants so that we align the links in the sector and see that each link contributes its quota, I believe if we do this even at this level we should be able to grow the sector,” he said.

Speaking on the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), the MAN president said the trade agreement has the potential to build Africa’s capacity to manufacture and change the narrative of the continent’s economy.

He said so far there has been significant progress in the implementation of the trade agreement however it is slow due to a various reasons which include documentation, requirements, among other issues.

“I agree it is still slow, we need to make things a bit faster and provide an enabling environment with friendly condition to drive intra African trade, we also have to ensure all our institutions are ready through capacity enhancement like the customs as some of them may not be fully conversant with the regulations of the agreement,” he said.

Mansur added that there have been negotiations that were intended to detail the terms of the protocols and also ensure that participating countries familiarize themselves with the provisions of the agreement.

Read also: Manufacturing investments to rebound as UK project kicks off in Nigeria

“Having signed the agreement there are a number of protocols that should be put in place, a number of institutions have to be established across the continent, there are also processes, policies and regulations to be agreed on and implemented before trade activities can be fully implemented, this is very critical to the success of AfCFTA and also important for the countries,” he said.

Mansur said that businesses in the private sector also need time and knowledge to strategically position themselves to benefit from the trade agreement and also familiarize themselves with the provisions and conditions of the agreement, adding that Nigerian manufacturers are prepared with many of them recording improvement in terms of product competitiveness, capacity utilization, packaging, etc.

“Another issue is that a lot of exports are going on informally, and they are not recorded; however if we put our house in order and the sector tries to do the right things, we should be able to benefit more from the trade agreement,” he added.