The Nigerian Sugar Masterplan may just be another failed policy, as it is currently being threatened by insufficient investment.
Investors have failed to buy into the lofty policy, which was designed to make the country one of the net exporters of sugar in the world, increase its foreign exchange earnings and help revamp the economy. They have not keyed into the Sugar Masterplan because it takes some time to recoup the investment in the sugar industry and fear of policy inconsistency.
As a precursor to what eventually became the Nigerian Sugar Masterplan, the Federal Government said it considered sugar as the third most important commodity after rice and wheat in its strategic food policy. This also followed the rationale that Nigeria has the reservoir of land, water and human resources to produce sugar in sufficient quantity to meet national demand and for export to earn foreign exchange.
According to Olusegun Aganga, the then minister of trade and investment, this lacklustre performance had deprived the country of all the benefits derivable from a vibrant sugar sector. Chief among these was the annual drain on the country’s foreign exchange earnings put at N101.9bn in 2011, the loss of hundreds of thousands of employment opportunities for skilled and semi-skilled labour and food insecurity arising from sugar import dependence.
By the late 1990s, the Nigerian government had moved to privatise the two companies. They were eventually sold to new private owners. Attempts by the government to establish other sugar companies at Lafiagi and Sunti never really got off the ground. The Jigawa State government also established a 1500tcd sugar factory at Hadejia in 2005 but never completed it to date.
Busari, on his part, had assured that the Federal Government’s strategy to achieve self-sufficiency in sugar production through the NSMP was still on track. But this did little to convince stakeholders who were concerned about the infighting among major industry players.The rift was expected, given the volume of resources invested by these big guns, who had a vested interest in the backward integration programme of the Federal Government.
This, of course, stemmed from the fact that some operators in the sub-sector were said to be setting up facilities that appear to be sustaining the importation of bulk sugar, thereby, abusing the subsidy facility set up by the government to ensure the availability of the product while efforts were intensified locally to bolster local production.
The investments, the company said, were expected to boost the country’s quest for self-sufficiency in sugar production as the country plans to produce 1.5 m tonnes of refined sugar from sugar plantations covering 150,000 hectares of land across various sites.in Numan, the Chief Executive Officer, DSR, Numan, Mr Chinnaya Sylvain Judex, said the company was targeting to produce 9,800 metric tonnes of sugar per day at the end of the current expansion.
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