Editorial
Whereas the tale of Nigeria’s botched industrial dreams easily qualifies for legendary, that of the paper industry can be said to emblematise one of the uglier faces of those structural distortions for which the nation’s economy is notorious. That appears to be at the heart of the summation by Olugbemi Malomo, President of the Chartered Institute of Professional Printers of Nigeria, while appraising the efforts of the ministerial committee set up by the Federal Government to revive the paper mills. Describing the measure as “a good step”, he noted that even at full capacity, the three paper mills can only produce 200,000 metric tons of different grades of paper as against the over three million metric tons consumed, as a result of which the country currently shells out a whopping N3 trillion in import bills.
His account is neither strange nor entirely surprising. If anything, it is merely another window, not just into yet another of the nation’s failed aspirations, but also of the gross mismanagement that has characterised similar industrialisation efforts.
The first paper mill – the Nigeria Paper Mill, Jebba, Kwara State, primarily designed to produce corrugated cartons, sack craft, kraft paper, linear and chip board as well as fluting media, was established in the 60s. And then the coming of the Nigerian Newsprint Manufacturing Company (NNMC), Oku Iboku, Akwa Ibom State, and that of the Nigerian National Paper Manufacturing Company (NNPMC), Iwopin, Ogun State, in what was supposed to be a well-thought-out strategy to address not only the nation’s needs in the areas of newsprint manufacturing but also in printing paper. Several decades after, the story is one of systemic regression, the result of which the nation currently relies wholesale on paper imports.
In each of the cases, the story is all-too familiar. In the case of the Jebba Mill, although it took off on a promising note, creating jobs for hundreds of Nigerians, it would later succumb to the Nigerian malaise of poor planning, lack of requisite investment and chronic mismanagement. Later privatised in the late 1980s, it somehow remained a shadow of its old promising self – unable to live up to its potential. As for the NNMC, it was a case of the company starting off on a weak foundation, particularly with a critical input, the long fibre, having to be imported in the situation that the domestic substitutes were neither developed nor serious attention paid to backward integration ab initio. Left to flounder as the newspaper industry, its target market, considered its products inferior to the imported ones, the company, faced with little chance of survival, was eventually sold in 1993 and with it the collapse of the lofty dream. The case of the Iwopin Paper Mill was even worse because it never really took off as it was plagued with such challenges ranging from non-availability of raw materials, power supply challenges, to obsolete machinery, until it was eventually sold.
Several decades after, the least that could be said is that the so-called privatisation was an unmitigated disaster. Nigerians deserve to know how and at what point things went wrong. Were there no binding agreements between the Federal Government and the eventual owners on what should become of the entities post-privatisation? Or was it a case of the investors taking advantage of government’s laxity to strip the companies of their valuable assets for profit? Considering how critical the industry is to the larger economy, are there options left for the government if only to rescue the sector, particularly at this time, and thereby save the nation the millions of dollars spent on the importation of paper and paper products? While these matters should be of interest to both the Federal Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investment, as indeed the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE), such inquiries must be driven by the urgent need to revive the sector.
