Before Xmas Buhari needs to call of a meeting of all Nigeria's millionaires and set them these industrial production targets to save Nigeria from economic collapse in 2021

Ayo Akinfe

[1] 10m tonnes of steel
[2] 20m pre-paid electricity metres
[3] 5m electricity transformers
[4] 20m mobile phone handsets
[5] 2m automobiles must be assembled locally
[6] 10m flatscreen TV sets
[7] 10m tonnes of maize
[8] 5m tonnes of sugar
[9] 10 tonnes of rice
[10] 50m pairs of footwear
[11] 1,000 railway carriages
[12] 20bn kg of milk
[13] 2m tonnes of beef
[14] 1bn square feet of leather goods
[15] 5m bicycles
[16] 2m motorcycles
[17] 10m generator sets
[18] 10m tonnes of tomatoes
[19] 10m fridge/freezers
[20] 10bn metres of fabric cloth

It appears that the penny has not yet dropped and Nigerians are oblivious to the fact that they no longer have the foreign exchange to imports goods as used to be the case. With crude oil prices and demand dropping, federal government revenue has about halved.

When you no longer have the foreign exchange to import goods, you have no choice but to produce them locally. Everywhere else in the world, you have an industrial bourgeois class who run factories that produce goods for internal consumption and export.

Unfortunately, in Nigeria, most of the millionaires are either importers, government contractors or owners of oil blocs. To get out of this rut, this simply has to change.

For me, Innocent Chukwuma is the one notable exception in Nigeria, as he alone has shown the capacity to mass produce industrial goods. In Russia, Vladimir Putin has managed to force his oligarchs to step up production and unless Nigeria does likewise, we are heading for Armageddon.

Just take the railway carriages that recently broke down along the Abuja to Kaduna line. If we had a local factory that manufactured them, we could have replaced these carriages within a week but now, we have to wait for fresh supplies from China at exorbitant costs.

Likewise, it will take months of negotiation with the new Biden administration to get the US to supply Nigeria with attack helicopters to take on Boko Haram. If we manufactured such hardware locally, maybe be now we would have eliminated those who killed the innocent 43 rice farmers.

With farmers now scared of going to their farms due to the Boko Haram and Fulani herdsmen menace, has it not occurred to us that we are facing starvation? What will we do when food shortages hot and we do not have the foreign exchange to purchase imports?

Were I in President Buhari's shoes, I would give the likes of Dangote, Otedula, Adenuga, Alakija, Chukwuma, Onyeama, etc all the support they need to step up production. They need to build new plants, import equipment, get industrial estates up and running and hire staff to run their plants.