The Federal Government has been called upon to address the infrastructural challenges in the country in order to ensure even growth of the economy, especially the automobile industry.
The government is also challenged to tackle the paucity of foreign exchange, which is crippling many businesses in the country.
Mr. Abiona Babarinde, the General Manager, Marketing and Corporate Communications, Coscharis Group in an interaction with automobile journalists at the just concluded 17th edition of the 2022 Lagos Motor Fair, lamented that entrepreneurs are faced with myriads of challenges in the country limiting their growth.
Babarinde specifically said that the automobile investors required more supports, encouragement and motivation from the government, stressing that with much support from the government, indigenous auto companies would increase their activities in the industry, thereby engaging more qualified technical personnel.
He said: “Assembling vehicles is like a mini manufacturing and we are talking of semi-knocked down. There is actually nothing stopping us from doing a fully built. But, you can’t do all this because you also have all the accessories that are needed to also be situated in your environment. So, you can imagine that 100 per cent of what we assemble here are all imported.
“We all know what the foreign exchange says. So, that tells you the challenges that a local manufacturer like Coscharis is facing, but we are not relenting because we believe in our country, we believe it can be better and we want to prove a point. And that has also really impressed our partners, Renault over the years that we are still standing and we are still producing these two.
“You can imagine if we have that very good environment, we would produce more. In fact these are not all the variants of Renault. If we are producing more that means you are expanding your plant. There is nothing saying we can’t have assembly plants in all the six geopolitical zones of Nigeria. And what does that also you and I? It means we are going to also generate more employment. Because the employment aspect is also what will add value from our own end to the economic improvement of our country.”
Babarinde explained further that if the auto companies could locally produce the accessories, assembling of vehicles would be cheaper, adding that the vehicles would also be assembled to suit the local terrain.
“So, all these things are what we need the government to support us with and by the time we get that support, we are able to employ more Nigerians and that automatically gives us a good soft landing,” he added.
Source: Independent
