By Favour Nnabugwu

The Federal Government is pushing a bill at the National Assembly to mandate Nigerians to patronise local manufacturers in order to stimulate industrialisation.

Minister of Trade and Investment, Mr. Olusegun Aganga who made this known during a visit to the Onne Oil and Gas Free Trade Zone in Port Harcourt recently, noted that the Federal Government was committed to growing the economy through industrialisation and backward integration.

The proposed bill, he explained, would enable local producers to source their materials in the country and ultimately create jobs to plug the unemployment gap.

”The lack of patronage of products produced locally is one of the reasons for the low capacity utilisation and contribution to GDP. We will work with the industries to enhance their productivity, improve the quality of their products and ensure that we significantly reduce the importation of substandard products as we work towards achieving zero tolerance in this area.

“We are already working on a local patronage bill that will ensure that made in Nigeria goods are patronised. We are going to help enhance the production capacity of the industries so that they will be able to satisfy local consumption and also export.

Once manufacturers have good market for their products and produce in a business-friendly environment, jobs will be created and wealth generated.

“It is about using the materials we have locally. That is the way you create jobs and industrialise a nation. We have shipyards in this country where boats, vessels can actually be built.

We have, today, a company that has the capacity to build and maintain vessels and boats, yet we are buying these things from abroad. We should not allow that to happen again.”

He said the government would use the Free Trade Zone strategy to achieve its industrialisation goal, especially in the petrochemical and service industry, noting that the use of local materials for production in these areas had saved the country foreign exchange that would have been used for importation.

Aganga said that the Oil and Gas Free Trade Zone had created about 30,000 direct and indirect jobs, noting that the Federal Government will continue to market free trade zones to potential investors.

“I am particularly impressed by the number of highly skilled Nigerians working in the different organisations operating in the oil and gas free trade zone, which has now become a one-stop shop for the sector,” the minister noted.

In his presentation, the General Manager, DMS Nigeria Limited, Mr. Sunday Wama, said that the zone generated $5.4 billion for various government agencies from 2007 to 2011, adding that the private sector capital investment contribution was $2.3 billion in OGFZ.

Earlier, the Managing Director, Onne Oil and Gas Free Trade Zone Authority, Dr. Noble Abe, stated that the zone had the potential to attract more investment if the right incentives were put in place to attract investors, adding that a lot of services and manufacturing, which were being done abroad, were currently being done in the zone.