Demi Samande, CEO Majeurs Holdings in her presentation at the Vanguard Economic Discourse harped on the need for government policy to focus on providing infrastructure to enhance competitiveness of SMEs and empowering youths with skills to boost productivity. 

It was a humid evening in the factory, and it was 8pm in the evening, the factory was incredibly silent.

Our artisans, all 25 of them, were sitting idle, doing nothing. Yet we had a huge consignment that was due to be in Uganda. 

In a matter of six weeks, we were already running incredibly behind on our deliveries. The client was incredibly impatient, very frustrated with us, but unfortunately for us, our team was incredibly overworked. We had spent several weeks sourcing raw materials delivering various different samples to the client, both their local representations and the International representations.

We had spent weeks testing materials, making samples in the factory, but this particular evening, 8pm, it was complete blackout.

The generators were not working. There was no NEPA. There was no movement.

Now you can imagine this type of scenario where everybody was very anxious. As the CEO of this organization, you can imagine the anxiety that I was feeling trying to manage my team. You can imagine the looks on my staff faces, and the frustration that they want to work. They had stayed behind for long hours, but they could not do anything.

Now, Nigeria manufacturers, on average, spend about 40 percent on energy, predominantly diesel throughout a year. Our global competitors are averaging less than 10 percent on energy for their production lines.

Every single blackout that we experience in Lagos, in Nigeria, equals a loss in profit. It equals fewer jobs, and it equals stunted growth for the average SME manufacturer or business owner. 

My personal experience in this regard  has been the high cost of diesel. I did not grow up in Nigeria. I came here because I had a dream of manufacturing in Africa and exporting to a global market. And I am sharing with you a little bit. But that experience so far has been distracted by incredibly high power resources that I have to endure every single day, from diesel expenditures to wastage. The average Nigerian SME records about 25 to 45 percent waste factor in their production lines. For me, that is incredibly scary as a young manufacturer. Profitability is affected every single day.

Now it is great for what I’m explaining to you, my business is still running. Resilience is what we have as Nigerians. In all honesty, we do not surrender to the setbacks, but unfortunately for us, we are investing far too heavily in energy, and because of that, we have to reinvest into renewable energy, solar and factories. Since that incident happened at 8pm that night, because we wanted to do a delivery for export, we had to invest incredibly heavily into solar power and all of that. And because we’ve taken that step does not necessarily mean that that should be the status quo for the average business in Nigeria.

I am in a position to do that. Not many manufacturers are. They really are not and that’s not something that we should necessarily be proud of as manufacturers and people who are trying to change the economy story of our country. So let me tell you another story. 

A few years ago, I decided to start training artisans because it was one of the solutions that I found to a lot of the problems that I had. I trained a young man called Kunle and Kunle came to me very, very young, at the age of 19. He had been living under a bridge for seven years. 

He did not have a family, and he’d been relying on his local community to pretty much get by. And I took Kunle into the factory and I put him  under the arms of my furniture carpenters and my forestry makers, and within two years, Kunle had basically garnished a set of skills that allowed him today, as I am speaking to you, that was about two years into my operations, and Kunle left me about two years ago. We are now in 2025 and Kunle is now training and retraining others. Now that decision for us was a critical one. 

And, it is one of the reasons why we feel that our journey as a nation generally has to happen on the factory floor. It is not by sitting on panels time after time writing white papers. It is for us to be on the factory floor training our young people to basically work in factories and to produce items. 

And we need to support in all the areas that are not helping us to achieve that goal. 

We need to look very honestly at those things and figure it out

Now, again, because I have been looking at these solutions for a long time, one of the things I decided to do was start a training academy. And Kunle was contributing quite effectively to some of our trainings, and we have seen that these things in action are actually helping.

 They are actually changing little, tiny drops, and we need to escalate those activities and do more, amplify them, invest in our young people, Support the businesses like mine, because unfortunately, if we do not do that, we’re going to continue to fail. 

We are leaving so much money on the table. We are losing opportunities every day. We are positioned to do exports all around Africa, to do exports to the UK, to the US all around the world, but we’re not putting in enough energy into doing that. Now, today, for me, the factory lights are on, as I’m talking to you right now, my team is at the factory. 

They are working. Our lights are on due to the fact that we’ve invested quite heavily. But entrepreneurs like me should not be fighting infrastructure issues every single day that should not be our focus. We should be focused on innovating. We should be focused on creating jobs and keeping our profits to reinvest back into our organizations and our businesses. Real growth needs good governance. 

We are begging for it. We are asking and repeating every single day. But you know, I know that in ESG have reported that 25 percent of the policies are not implemented effectively. So I think that 25 percent of policies that are in fact implemented effectively, but the rest of the world are operating on 40, 60 percent the likes of China, the likes of South Korea, are implemented every single day to creating clusters of young people, SMEs, who are setting up organizations, clusters who are supporting themselves, becoming interdependent. 

We need to focus on doing more things like that. And so, you know, you asked me if I really think that these policies are helping us. Policies are fantastic, but like I mentioned, I am more interested in implementation. Our implementation teams should over exceed our policy creating teams and that is why I really think we should be focusing on people and young people who want to make a change.