Dike Onwuamaeze
The Centre for the Promotion of Democracy (CPPE) has described Nigeria’s 26 years of democratic rule as a period when Nigeria’s manufacturing sector remained largely trapped in a low-growth equilibrium.
The CPPE stated this in its assessment of the outcomes of Nigeria’s 26 years of uninterrupted democracy in a press statement titled “Manufacturing Under Democracy: A Story of Resilience Amid Structural Adversity,” where it said that the sector has moved “from industrial promise to industrial erosion.”
It outlined that government’s petroleum refineries, tyre manufacturing, textile and battery industries declined significantly and in some cases vanished away in the past 26 years.
According to the Chief Executive Officer of CPPE, Dr. Muda Yusuf, “Nigeria’s democratic journey has delivered only modest industrial outcomes, leaving the economy heavily dependent on primary commodities and imports.”
Yusuf said that the fact that manufacturing sector’s contribution to GDP has hovered between 9.0 and10 per cent for most of the period, underscored the absence of a decisive industrial transformation despite successive policy pronouncements and reform initiatives.
He said: “One of the defining features of the democratic era has been the progressive erosion of industrial capacity across several sectors.
“The collapse of the nation’s public refineries remains perhaps the most striking example. What should have been strategic industrial assets became victims of poor governance, policy failures, weak accountability and entrenched rent-seeking. Over time, the refineries deteriorated into symbols of institutional dysfunction, culminating in their complete shutdown and the loss of a critical pillar of industrialisation.”
He added: “The story is similar across several manufacturing subsectors. Textile mills that once employed hundreds of thousands of Nigerians have largely disappeared. The tyre industry collapsed. Battery manufacturing faded. Automobile assembly plants lost momentum. Many industrial clusters that once drove economic activity have either contracted significantly or vanished altogether. The consequence has been a gradual weakening of Nigeria’s industrial base and a growing dependence on imports for products that were once manufactured domestically.”
