Mr Hirotumi Nakamura, the President, Bridgestone BRM Corporation, Saitama, Japan, said Nigeria should embrace the technology of retreading tyres to conserve the crude oil used for the production.

Nakamura made the statement on Wednesday in Saitam, south of Tokyo, when members from UNIDO Delegate Programme, led by Mr Luqman Mamudu, Director of Policy and Planning of National Automotive Council (NAC), visited the factory. He said 60 per cent of crude oil was needed to produce new tyres but with the retreaded ones, half of that would be saved.

“If you embrace the technology of retreading, it not only saves costs but also environmentally friendly,” he said, cautioning however, that bad roads as well as bad driving could be a major challenge.

“If you have paved roads, and the drivers are good, the tyres can last very long,” a correspondent of the News Agency of Nigeria on the delegation quotes him as saying. Nakamura noted that the company”s policy would not allow for investment in Nigeria as the Dubai office was in charge of African countries.

However, Mr Koichi Hagiwara, the Industrial Development Officer of UNIDO, said the company”s technology would be appropriate in Nigeria as a developing country.

“UNIDO is an appropriate technological transfer organisation and if we find out that your technology is transferable, you can be our technical partner,” he said. Mamudu explained that the government had been partnering with the private sector to build more roads, saying that 30 to 40 per cent of roads were paved nationwide.