The high cost of transportation, production and activities of middlemen has been blamed for the recent hike in the price of cement, according to stakeholders in separate interviews with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Lagos.

Director-General, Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI), Mr Muda Yusuf, said that the increase in the price of the product was due to the high cost of transportation and production. “It is a supply side problem. There are issues about cost which are transportation and production costs.

Most of the cement manufacturing firms depend on Low Pour Fuel oil (LPFO) and expensive energy sources. We have to look at how we can bring down the cost of energy the manufacturers are consuming in the production of cement. We have to look at the cost of transportation because most of the movement of cement is by road.

“The trucks don’t use petrol, they make use of diesel and we all know what the cost of diesel is,” Yusuf said. He said that the price of cement would remain high as long as the energy component of production process remained high. Yusuf called on the Federal Government to address the fluctuating price of cement by identifying the critical bottlenecks in the supply of the product.

According to him, the Federal Government should also look at the supply side that has to do with importation. “I think there are issues of licenses. Government needs to look at how equitable it is because this is related to the manufacturers. That area should be looked at so that what we are producing locally can be properly augmented with imports,” he said.

Mr Sylvester Okurume, cement seller at Constain area of Lagos, said that the middlemen were selling the product to them at a high price, adding that the high price would be transferred to the consumer. He also said that the middlemen had been hoarding the product to create artificial scarcity and to make the price go up.

Okurume urged the Federal Government to take a drastic step to curb the activities of the middlemen to achieve a stable price of the product.  He said that the variation in the price differed from one location to another.

According to him, in my location, the price of Dangote cement which cost N3, 000 last week had drastically reduced to N2, 300. Another retailer on Apapa Road, Mr Jimoh Yusuf, said that the inability of the government to regulate the activities of the middlemen had contributed to the persistent increase in the price of cement.

Yusuf said that the Federal Government in the 1980s set up the price control board that checked hoarding and activities of middlemen. “But now, there is no board to control activities of the middlemen and that has affected the nation’s economy negatively,” he said. Yusuf said that the government should also monitor the activities of the manufacturers and ensure that they did not sell the product to retailers at higher prices.

In his comment, Mr Wahab Akolade, a retailer at Ojuelegba, said that until the activities of middlemen were checked, they would continue to frustrate the Federal Government’s effort.    Akolade urged the government to address the problem of hoarding of cement which, he said, had led to a hike in the price of the product. Cement now cost between N2, 300 and N3, 000 per 50 kg bag in Lagos.