Ken Ihedioha
We’re constantly revolving in circles; and this perhaps accounts for our very slow growth in virtually all the development indices. In healthcare, infant mortality, infrastructure services, electricity generation, wealth creation, number of children out-of-school and lots more, the records are damning. Musing on his social media handle, Sunday Ogunyemi wrote: “In 1963, the World Bank and the UN predicted that five countries in the developing world would become manufacturing nations by the turn of the century – two countries in Asia, two countries in South America and Nigeria the only one from Africa. By the year 2000, all the other four had become industrial nations; only Nigeria became worse than it was in 1963.”
The overall context for the foregoing was laid by the Governor of the Central Bank, Mr Godwin Emefiele, at a media briefing he addressed after the Monetary Policy Committee meeting in July. He was emphatic about the intention of the CBN to add milk and other dairy products to the list of restricted products on the foreign exchange market hinting that the restriction was to boost local production of dairy products and increase investment in ranches within the country. Emefiele noted that Nigeria currently spends about $1.2bn to $1.5bn annually on milk importation; a figure he said was not sustainable given the current dire straits in the economy. According to him, the CBN held meetings with leading milk producers with a view to encouraging them to begin the process of producing milk in 2016, regretting that there has been no significant progress on the part of the companies. Perhaps, if they had heeded his call, the persistent herder-farmer clash as we have witnessed would not have been as intense.
Expectedly, there has been a rash of reactions from a cross-section of Nigerians. According to Mr Segun Ajayi-Kadir, Director-General of the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria, “the addition of milk to restricted items would have a negative impact on the economy which might lead to downsizing of staff in the milk manufacturing industry, reduce government revenues and manufacturing sector’s contribution to GDP”. He lamented that the CBN’s decision was taken unilaterally without consultation with operators in the dairy industry warning that the policy could create negative effects from its desired purpose and escalate smuggling activities into the country. A former Minister of Education and presidential aspirant, Dr Oby Ezekwesili, slammed the alarming poverty rates in the country, saying the situation is likely to get worse with the CBN’s plan to ban the importation of milk. Just as she cautioned the CBN not to effect the ban, Ezekwesili chimed in thus: “This policy will raise the cost of living for especially the poor in our midst and their misery will create higher profits for domestic producers of milk who pass on their production inefficiencies to them”.
Milk, according to experts, has an overall impact on child nutrition, and even more for a growing population. It is regarded as the most complete single food item and significant amounts are consumed in the average daily intake of coffee, tea and other cocoa-based beverages. Despite its dietary benefits, milk-drinking and dependence on other dairy products such as cheese, butter, yoghurts and ice cream have been long regarded as basically an alien culture. Never mind that the last quarter of a century or so has spurned an improved middle-class culture with equally improved tastes and preferences gained from foreign exposure. Indeed, it was the arrival of colonisation in Nigeria that heralded the introduction of Nigeria’s exposure to modern dairy products with the penchant of the British for heavy consumption of tea and cocoa-based beverages. Dairy companies naturally took advantage of the relaxed import restrictions by government to flood the marketplace with various imported dairy products. There are brands that only make market entry at festive periods when they are guaranteed to make a kill, as it were. The importation of milk into Nigeria has thrived for over 60 years and milk producers may have been feeding fat on its proceeds. Local capacity to grow the industry was therefore deliberately made latent or at best they paid lip service to it in apparent pretence to keep the Nigerian government happy about their efforts at backward integration. A leading dairy brand consistently flew its audit committee to its dairy farms abroad to keep them happy while neglecting its own social corporate responsibility to lead advances in the development of dairy technology locally. Available records suggest that in at least the last five years, multi-national milk corporations nearly tripled their exports to the West African region and particularly Nigeria, shipping milk powder produced by heavily subsidised European farmers to be transformed into liquid milk for Nigeria and the West African sub-region’s booming middle class. In apparent agreement, sources have quoted Ian Brown, an economist based in Maryland, United States of America, as saying, “European milk is pouring into Africa, with disastrous effect for local herders and farmers. Multi-billion-euro dairy multi-nationals are exploiting rock-bottom European milk prices to expand aggressively into Nigeria and West African countries”.
Just as population pressure may have led to the disappearance of cattle grazing routes and thus spinning new realities, the high cost of importing milk may have brought the era of forex restriction on milk importation closer than expected. Nigerians have to make the hard choice and remain consistent in its pursuit. And there lies the rub: Policy inconsistency. Nigeria has yet to develop a consistent policy for its dairy industry and that is why multinationals can scoff at its back and pooh-pooh its policies; the same latitude they will never allow in their home countries. Every successive administration – military or civilian – develops a silo mentality that seeks to shut out some of the most worthy policies of its predecessor. Otherwise, backward integration is not new to Nigeria’s industry lexicon. The Babangida military administration made heavy weather out of it and industry operators responded very positively. This was nearly 30 years ago and one could just imagine how far developed we would have been in local self-sufficiency of raw materials had that policy been sustained. Companies including Nigerian Breweries, Cadbury, Flour Mills, WAMCO, Nestle, PZ, Unilever and many more made giant strides in sourcing local raw materials in order to build a sustainable supply chain. As a young correspondent within the African Concord stable, this writer was on the throes of developments within the industry. Science journalism was still much respected and many Nigerian newspapers had Science & Health columns to report developments and advancements in that critical sector of the economy. Buoyed up by vibrant ministers including Profs Gordian Ezekwe and later Emmanuel Emovon in Science & Technology as well as Prof Olikoye Ransome-Kuti in Health, Science and Health Journalism was a good perch. Dr Mrs Oluremi Aribisala of the Raw Materials Research and Development Council and the researchers at FIIRO and the IITA made good copy and their contributions got widely reported. With hindsight, that could be described as a golden era for Nigeria’s industrial revolution.
When you recall the many false starts in agriculture including Operation Feed the Nation, Green Revolution, the Directorate of Foods, Roads & Rural Infrastructure, and then backward integration spiced up with the very invigorating messages of Prof Jerry Gana’s MAMSER, you cannot but rue at our lost opportunities. We simply love to move forward in circles.
[Punch]
