Guest Columnist By John Owan Enoh
The Factory Floor Is Where Industrial Policy Is Judged
Two progress reports in, the test of the Nigeria Industrial Policy is no longer what we promise, but what we produce.
There is a temptation in public life to measure progress by the number of policies launched, communiqués signed and conferences convened. I have resisted that temptation, and I have asked the institutions I supervise to resist it too. When we presented the first 90-Day Progress Report on the Nigeria Industrial Policy in June, I made a simple commitment: the Policy would be judged by what it delivers on factory floors, on farms and in markets, not by what it promises on paper.
That is why we chose to report every ninety days. A quarterly cycle is uncomfortable by design. It leaves little room for vague intentions to sit unexamined, and it obliges every institution to show movement, or to explain why there has been none, while there is still time to correct course.
Our second report, published this month, is the first real test of that commitment. It also differs from the first in one important respect. For the first time, eight agencies, from the Bank of Industry and the Industrial Training Fund to the Standards Organisation of Nigeria and the National Automotive Design and Development Council, report in their own voice on what they did, what it achieved and what stands in their way. I asked for this deliberately. A Ministry summary can flatter. An account given by the institutions that carry the Policy into the economy is harder to dress up, and more useful for it.
So what does the record show?
It shows capital beginning to move through markets as well as budgets. The Bank of Industry’s inaugural Development Bond was oversubscribed and upsized to N274.18 billion, a clear signal that domestic investors will lend long to Nigerian industry when the vehicle is credible. That matters because no budget, however generous, can by itself finance the scale of industrial investment Nigeria needs. Our task is to build vehicles that private savings can trust.
It shows value addition moving from aspiration to obligation. Our three sugar refiners have concluded a binding agreement to produce no less than 1.22 million tonnes of sugar a year by 2030. That is not a target announced in a conference hall. It is a commitment with annual milestones attached, and thosemilestones will be reported on in the same way as everything else in this Policy. Every tonne grown and processed at home is a tonne we no longer import, and work created in our own rural communities.
It shows our quality infrastructure scaling. The Standards Organisation of Nigeria approved 217 Nigerian Industrial Standards and expanded from three testing laboratories to eight. A Nigerian manufacturer cannot sell into the African Continental Free Trade Area, or win a government contract under Nigeria First, without proof that its products meet a standard. Standards are not bureaucracy. They are market access.
And it shows a skills system rebuilding itself around certification that employers and foreign markets recognise. More than 200,000 artisans have registered for training and certification. A certificate that an employer in Lagos or a buyer in Accra can trust is worth more to a young artisan than any number of attendance lists. Young Nigerians are graduating as mechatronics technicians in Gusau and Birnin Kebbi, ready for the CNG and electric vehicles now arriving on our roads. One hundred of those electric buses were assembled here, in Nigeria.
But I want to dwell on the one constraint every manufacturer raises with me, without exception: power. No industrial policy survives an unreliable supply of electricity.
In September, together with the Honourable Minister of Power, I broke ground on a 50-megawatt dedicated power project for the Idu Industrial Estate in Abuja, delivered with Welbeck Electricity Distribution, the Abuja Electricity Distribution Company and Shell Gas. For the first time, a Nigerian industrial estate will be ring-fenced with its own dedicated supply. The first 10 megawatts are due in December.
I will be honest. Fifty megawatts is a start, not a solution; Idu alone needs several times that. We had hoped to deliver gas to the estate by August, and we did not. But Idu matters beyond its megawatts. It is a model, with industrial demand aggregated, supply dedicated and private capital engaged, that we intend to replicate in industrial clusters across the Federation. Energy remains the thinnest area of delivery in our report, and we have said so plainly. A progress report that hides its weakest point is not worth reading.
The second constraint is the cost and tenor of money. A manufacturer who must borrow at commercial rates over three years cannot compete with one who borrows affordably over ten. Factories, machinery and production lines pay for themselves over many years, and they cannot be financed with money that must be repaid in a few. That is why the Industrial Revolution Working Group devoted its second Ministerial Roundtable, held in Lagos on 11 September, to one question: how do we make long-term finance affordable for Nigerian industry, and design incentives that make industrial investment bankable? Government, finance and industry met at one table with one purpose, and the outcomes of that Roundtable will shape our financing agenda in the months ahead.
Several of the steps that will set the pace of the next phase require action across Government, not by my Ministry alone: financial close on large programmes such as the AfDB-supported MSME Industrial Clusters Programme, the financing framework for our sugar estates, and a modern legal framework for special economic zones. Our report sets out twelve such enabling actions, and we are taking each of them forward with our partners across Government. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda treats industrialisation as the work of the whole of Government, and that is how we are approaching it.
It is also the work of more than Government. Much of what this report records was delivered by our agencies, our development partners, the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria and the organised private sector. Their partnership is the reason there is progress to report.
I would ask Nigerians to read this report as they would read the accounts of any enterprise in which they hold a stake, because they do hold a stake in this one. Look at what was promised, what was delivered and what was not. Where we have fallen short, we have said so, and the next report will show whether we have closed the gap. That is what accountability means in practice: not a single moment of judgement, but a record kept in public, quarter after quarter, against which every institution can be measured.
Industrial renewal is not a sprint. It is built one estate, one standard, one certified artisan and one production line at a time. The next ninety days must convert commitments into production. That is the standard to which we hold ourselves, and it is the standard to which Nigerians are entitled to hold us.
•Senator John Owan Enoh is the Honourable Minister of State for Industry, Federal Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investment, and Chairman of the Industrial Revolution Working Group.