Over 20m jobs available in raw materials-based cluster, says Wachuku

By Ambrose Nnaji

The raw materials-based clusters if effectively implemented will generate over 20 million jobs for Nigerians on annual basis, President, Association of Agricultural and Industrial Entrepreneurs of Nigeria AIEN, Chuku Wachuku, has said.

Wachuku said the cluster initiative highlighted shared industrial facilities as it will encourage value chain operators to manage limited resources, share expertise as well as operate and address common challenges including market, innovations, product improvement, among others at a least cost.

According to him, it is a strategy intended to foster the development of value-added products from the abundant local resources, as well as encourage the establishment of viable small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that are adaptable to local contents’ development in Nigeria.

Wachuku who spoke with the Nation Update in said Lagos the clusters initiative in the pilot stage is expected to create about two hundred and fifty entrepreneurs per cluster per local government and the primary target is to create sixty thousand primary entrepreneurs.

He said the primary targeted pilot local government will involve sixty thousand members of the clusters, he explained each cluster will have two hundred and fifty people in two hundred and fifty hectares adding they will be producing crops of advantage in their area.

Meanwhile, the organisation is working with some banks and has reached an agreement only to finalise some arrangements, he disclosed adding an ecosystem that will guarantee recovery is already in place.

Wachuku who also measures as the Former Director-General of Operations, National Directorate of Employment (NDE) and Former National President, Nigerian Association of Small Scale Industrialists (NASSI) urged the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to support the deposit money banks who brought up products that will generate employment and give them interest buy back so that they could advance these money to the entrepreneurs who would create employment

“We are going to look at interest rates, I’m sure the CBN will also see the need to support these deposit money banks with lowered interest rates, right now what the CBN is doing is transferring the risk to the deposit money banks and not assuming any”, he expressed.

He said as a business membership organisation (BMO), AIEN was designed to empower the Nigerian people to create wealth by alleviating the unemployment epidemic in the country. The organisation he stated was aimed at achieving this through expanding business opportunities in the agricultural and industrial sectors of the economy.

It is projected to empowering the Nigerian people, alleviate the widespread unemployment, and create wealth in the country by expanding business opportunities in the agricultural and industrial sectors of the economy.

Wachuku said clustering would create common services, effective monitoring, and effective consultancy. “We are actually creating a brand new initiative in this country, and the fact will be that every local government across the 774 local governments of the country will have a cluster of advantageous produce in those states”

The impact of this on the nation’s economy Wachuku said is that it will reduce prices. He explained any time supply is over demand the price must go down noting there is so much demand on the economy such that there’s importation disorder in the economy.

It will also create an eco-system that will guarantee the deposit money banks and the development finance institutions the assurance they will recover their money. He noted deposit money banks are now clamouring for good platform which AIEN offers to be able to advance their lending adding the risk factor in the small and medium enterprises (SME) sector is so high such that they are afraid to lend.

“We are coming up with a strategy that will first create funds for our members who will own businesses, when they own these businesses it’s their responsibility to accept the facility, it’s also their responsibility to repay the loan”, he stated.

He agreed it’s the duty of the organization to ensure that these funds are returned. When you inject these capital into the system particularly directed at agriculture, and agriculture value chain you are going to produce food for local consumption, produce food for industrial raw materials, create produce for exports and earn foreign exchange,

When the nation is importing less and less it will impact on the foreign exchange rate regime because there will be less pressure on the dollar, you don’t have too many people chasing the dollar anymore, and they will be earning foreign exchange.

He said arrangements had been concretized to sign off taker agreement with domestic users and foreign users of our produce to avoid waste, adding the era where you produce so much and its wasting away is over. When it’s wasting you are discouraging the farmers because there’s no organised ecosystem that will take care of those produce, that’s why we are exceptional in our own strategy, he added.

According to him, clustering will make it easy to locate processing industries such as cassava chips, starch, animal feed, industries among others deriving from the raw materials that will fill that industry adding the problem is always the raw material required to create these industries to actually produce

Within the economy itself, we are going to energize the industrial base, many industries are shut down because first the dollar went up because their production was raw material based and import dependent, they couldn’t compete and as a resultant material became cheaper, he explained

Now these industries were shut and were creating jobs outside Nigeria, when we now create let’s say a cluster of cotton it will now trigger the cotton industries to open up again and people will run them.

That’s how you create employment and when you now employ people they earn wages and each of these clusters be it groundnut, maize, cassava, will employ people. And if you now take the aggregate of the value chain of employment creation each entrepreneur would have employed over 20 people within that cycle of farming, because you are going to have people who do the labour, planting, transportation to evacuate the produce, and people who cook around there at that time adding it will energize the private sector, and employ labour, Wachuku explained.