IMHOTEP: A death we can't afford

That the Nigerian manufacturing sector is dying a slow and painful death is no longer news. Local factories are folding up in droves while foreign subsidiaries are re-locating to Ghana and elsewhere. Casualties include the textiles, the coca cola condensate plant at Ottah, Dunlop, Michelin and many others.

It was the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo who used to say that ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free. We have to own up to the simple truth that, where industrial policy is concerned, our national system has been a catalogue of folly after folly.

In the civilised world, the closure of one major factory would be a subject of serious debate in parliament. Authorities would move swiftly to find a way to salvage the situation. Policymakers would rally round to re-consider the fundamental lineaments of statecraft that redress the situation.

I get the impression that nobody really cares. If a factory closes in Aba, it does not bother me because my cousin is not the managing director.

If thousands of families fall into destitution in Kaduna because the textiles have folded up it does not matter because they are faceless numbers that mean nothing to me personally. If a food-processing plant goes belly up in Ekiti, which one be my own?

Such, presumably, is the debased reasoning of our political classes and the primitive instincts that inspire our nomenklatura.

I do not think the issue is entirely one of economic illiteracy. Even a JSS pupil knows what is wrong with our manufacturing sector: the lack of electricity and power, the prohibitive costs of diesel, the lack of infrastructures, the high costs of doing business, the lack of physical security, policy inconsistencies and slippages and the generally poor business environment.

Fundamentally, our problem is a lack of vision. We do not understand the first principles of civilised government. From John Locke to Thomas Jefferson and William Gladstone, the institution of government exists for the sole purpose of ensuring the good life for all its citizens.

In our day, the definition of the Good Life of necessity includes ensuring full employment with living wages within decent working environments.

For a nation of 140 million people, the collapse of the industrial sector is a calamity of monumental proportions.

Given the demographic and structural changes that have occurred in this country over the last decades, it is clear that agriculture alone can no longer absorb the millions of teeming youths that leave the school system, drifting to our sprawling urban conurbations in search of work.

Industries - especially of the agro-allied variety -- and services are the main viable outlets for absorbing this rising army of unemployed youths. When factories are non-existent, they have to resort to coping mechanisms that range from petty trading to hustling, thieving and prostitution.

Consider the case of a nineteen year old whom I shall call Amina, originally from Kogi State. She lives with her parents in Kakuri, Kaduna.

Her father used to be a worker at one of the textile factories. Since the factory closed down and he was laid off five years ago, at forty-five, he has never had another job. Amina stopped school after junior secondary school and is barely literate.

The entire family lives in a two-room ramshackle tenement that has a leaking roof. During much of this rainy season she and her four siblings have had to put buckets all over the ‘house’ to stop the place from flooding. Believe it or not, there have been days when they have felt the pangs of hunger.

For weeks on end, the father would disappear, only to reappear suddenly. She remembered the day he beat the daylights out of her was when she saw him with a bit of money and asked and innocently asked, “Daddy, who gave you money?”

She has been traumatised by the knowledge that her mother has sometimes brought her boyfriends home - six of them at the last count. Her mother has often slept out overnight when the husband is not around, often returning with money with which she buys food for the family. That is what she uses to feed the family.

Amina has taken to weaving women’s hair to put a bit of cash in her pocket. Predictably, she is bitter and angry. She says she totally despises her parents -- afraid of the future and of life in general. She trembles and she weeps.

There are millions of Aminas all over this country. Many more will be recreated as the factories continue to close and our national system forecloses the lifechances of so many. I fear that we are producing a generation of angry Nigerians who will take their revenge with violence and embitterment.

Electric wires and blood hounds will not save the rich from their cocoon of impunity. Building this economy and rehabilitating the industrial sector to generate jobs is a political imperative of the highest order. It is the moral burden of our generation and we ignore it at our mortal peril.