Why Nigeria Is Missing In $3trn AGOA Benefits
The Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN) has said that disunity among exporters, poor quality, lack of standardisation, forex challenges have combined to block Nigerian products from accessing major United States’ shopping malls and supermarkets.
This, therefore, denies the country the benefits of the $3 trillion African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) programme.
President of MAN, Mansur Ahmed disclosing this, hereby confirmed last week’s report by insidebusiness.ng that poor quality, lack of standardisation and others have robbed the country of huge benefits from the United States market.
Speaking with our correspondent in Lagos, Ahmed said: “AGOA could be 20 years on, but Nigerian manufacturers started late in keying into the U.S trade pact compared to other countries in the African continent and this brought major setbacks to the progress and successful penetration of made in Nigerian products in the United States.”
He explained that this had given room for illegal smuggling of some Made-in-Nigeria goods via the uncoordinated informal market and had caused the country’s Gross Domestic Product fortunes in terms of foreign exchange earnings.
Ahmed noted a lack of cooperation among the different sub-sectors in terms of value chain links as one sub-sector was always trying to sabotage the efforts of others in the industry.
He cited the cotton growers, textiles and garments, and ginners operators as a subsector where lack of cooperation and unity had given room to nefarious activities in the informal market.
Ahmed said: “I have two responses; yes, we did not respond to AGOA in time. As at the time when it was introduced, other nations took advantage of it. However, you know Nigeria is a large economy sometimes it will take time to respond to changes and so on.
“But I had a meeting with the cotton, textile and garment industry and what we have agreed is we need to, first of all, go back to the drawing board on what we need to do on AGOA. What had happened before is that the different links in the value chain, the cotton people, the textile people and the garment people didn’t work together for the interest of the economy. The cotton people are producing textile while the garment people are more concerned with importation. So, we have agreed that we are going to sit down and work out a process where each industry will have a role to play in the overall improvement in that sector, so that the cotton, the ginners, the textile manufacturers, the garment and apparel industry will have a link. It is only when they work together that we can see an improvement in the whole sector’s value chain.
“For instance, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) introduced a CTG (Cotton, Textile and Garments) intervention fund to the cotton growers but because that intervention fund was not extended to the ginners, the cotton was grown but there was nowhere to go since the ginners who are meant to purchase it rejected it. “So these are the sort of issues we are looking at.
“Our hope, as manufacturers, is that we will continue to lean our support to each sector, so as to improve the value of the link chain.
“We will identify what is supposed to be done so that each link attains progress and I believe that if we do this and put our house in order and these sectors too are ready to work in cooperation together, we should be able to benefit more from AGOA.
“However, a lot of Nigerian textile clothes are being put on in United States, United Kingdom, China and others, but they were exported via informal market that is why we are not seeing the benefits of AGOA locally.”
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