Overhauling our moribund paper mills

THE privatisation of Nigeria’s three state-owned paper mills has gone awry, just the way many other sold public assets have. For not performing, the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria and the Raw Materials Research and Development Council are now leading the advocacy for the Federal Government to revisit the transactions in the national interest. Apparently, they have a point.

The implementation of the Federal Government’s import substitution policy, which started from independence, coupled with the increasing demand for paper and paper products in the country, according to African Development Bank, brought about the government’s decision to expand its industrial base to include pulp and paper, to develop Gmelina plantations and ultimately to establish domestic integrated pulp and paper mills in three locations in the country. In question are: the Nigeria Paper Mill, Jebba, Kwara State; the Nigeria Newsprint Manufacturing Company, Oku-Iboku, Akwa Ibom State; and the National Paper Manufacturing Company, Iwopin, Ogun State. Skeletal production is reportedly going on at the NPM. By 1990, the Oku-Iboku plant had produced 37,581 metric tons of newsprint, which reduced importation by 12.7 per cent. But it was shut down in 1993 before its completion, and consequently privatised. The NPM, which had produced 42,960 tons of kraft paper as of 1986, is the biggest of them all.

This picture is quite telling on the economy. Newsprint, writing and printing paper, hygiene and sanitary paper, packaging paper and paper bonds are being imported, thus depleting the country’s scarce foreign exchange.  The Director-General of RMRDC, Azikiwe Onwualu, said recently that the country lost well over N400 billion annually to paper products importation. It is a reality Oluwadare Oluwafemi, a professor of Agriculture and Forestry at the University of Ibadan, stretched further with his assertion that “90 per cent of paper used in Nigeria is imported.”

The scale of the crisis is deepening. Jobs in the sector have been lost; its 300,000 workforce has been diminished to just 10,000, says the national president of the workers’ union, Dada Joseph. The Pulp and Paper Products Printing and Publishing Senior Staff Association of Nigeria has petitioned President Muhammadu Buhari to intervene, worried that successive administrations have been indifferent to the urgency to resuscitate the ailing mills.

End-users of paper products are in dire straits, too. The print media, arguably the worst hit, often face a crisis of newsprint – a critical input in their production. As cost of production ramps up steadily, newspapers recently increased their cover prices from N150 to N200 per copy, for daily newspapers; and weekend newspapers price spiked from N200 to N250 per copy, just to remain afloat. For a country where the reading culture is abysmally poor, the consequences in terms of information dissemination and freedom of expression could be more injurious to the well-being of the society than imagined.

As a matter of fact, the situation corrodes the fundamental objective behind the existence of the media. Section 22 of the 1999 Constitution expressly entrusts the media with the statutory role of being the watchdog of the society: to “… uphold the responsibility and accountability of the government to the people.” This role appears threatened.

When this obligation is abridged, either by omission or commission, decent societies are jolted. Thomas Jefferson, a former president of the United States, in his perception of the  media’s role as the Fourth Estate of the Realm, instructively said, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” To save jobs in the sector, the Federal Government should consider removing all tariffs on newsprint and other materials used for newspaper and magazine production.

Therefore, in a country like Nigeria, where treasury looting has become an article of faith, an economic policy that threatens the survival of the mass media inadvertently entrenches corruption and disorderly society.  This is why there is the overarching need for government and all the stakeholders in the sector to strategise on ways to reorganise the paper mills for optimal operations.

No doubt, they have challenges limiting their capacity. Experts have identified lack of long fibre pulp, a material got from trees, as the most critical.  This means that an aggressive afforestation programme should be implemented to lessen the dependence on importation. Such remedial drive is shared by the President of MAN, Frank Jacobs, who advised state governments to provide “land to enable paper mills to grow pulp.” Besides the long fibre pulp shortage, the energy supply challenge, which has ruined thousands of businesses, is a clear and present danger.

Canada, the United States, China, Sweden, Germany, Brazil, France and Finland are among global leaders in paper and pulp export. The sector’s capacity for job creation is evident in the 1.5 million people it employs in China; 230,000 in the US; 300,000 in India; and 70,000 in Brazil, according to an International Labour Organisation 1992 data.

It is obvious that the Federal Government has been markedly reckless and incompetent in doing due diligence on buyers of our public assets. The focus has primarily been on the highest bidder, with scant or no consideration for technical competence or financial capacity of the bid winners to optimally manage the firms in order to enhance economic growth and employment. This anomaly, in some cases, has led to asset stripping by the new owners, huge job losses and a bad name for privatisation.

Now, a new direction has become imperative. And it should be spearheaded by the government, conscious of the positive impact of the resurgent mills on the educational sector and the media as well as taking the unemployed off the streets.