COLEMAN CABLES BOSS LAMENTS HIGH ENERGY COST

By NBF News

The Managing Director of Coleman cables, Mr. George Onafowonkan, has lamented the high cost of generating  alternative electricity supply by manufacturing  industries, adding that his company  alone has within the last two years of its operations spent over N60 million on generator expenses.

'Today, infrastructure is worse than it was before. We run our factory on generator 90 per cent of the day; if you look at investment on generators, it continues, we opened this new factory two years ago and in those two years, we have managed to maintain  generator expenditures at  N60 million excluding diesel,'  he told Vanguard.

'So you just find out that you spend an adequate amount of your capital buying generators and diesel. It is not encouraging; instead of investing more in machineries and creating more jobs. Our own sustainability of it is we continue to deal with the challenges as they come,  I hope that the current government as they go on, will put more effort into seeing sustainability of industries.'

According to him, manufacturing in Nigeria is a necessity; as it sometimes has to be seen as more of a duty to one's country. His words 'In any country, sustainability is also by industry because we create more employment, not from the trading, yes, certain sectors still do quite well in terms of employment but industries sustain long term employment, it also sustains knock on effect of supply chain, which means most of the time you have an industry, another industry is supplying that industry' he stated.

He admitted that they are in a lucky sector as made in Nigeria cable is preferred and well accepted in the country.

'If we continue to focus a lot more on industry, it will bring about development and that itself will impact production of importation of substandard products. I for one believe in the importance of Nigeria to continue to focus on industry, see industry as a long term sustainable sector for Nigeria as a whole and for me, if I look at the cable industry today with the amount of influxes of substandard cables, we are in the lucky industry outfit where everybody knows that made in Nigeria cable is better and it is very surprising that you don't actually need to challenge people because they prefer made in Nigeria, it shows that our standard are very high but we still have a lot of substandard cables that do come in which affects what we do in the country' he said.