• Says import liberalisation pathway to de-industrialisation
Dike Onwuamaeze
Centre for the Promotion of Private Enterprise (CPPE) yesterday described the attempt to portray Dangote Refinery as a monopolistic threat in order to promote import liberalisations of refined petroleum products as simplistic and a pathway to Nigeria’s de-industrialisation.
CPPE said Nigeria had just witnessed one of the most consequential industrial investments in Africa through the establishment of the Dangote Refinery, alongside growing investments in modular refineries across the country that should be strategically supported, celebrated, and strengthened.
It expressed concern over the growing advocacy for unbridled importation of petroleum products at a time Nigeria should be consolidating domestic refining capacity and accelerating its industrialisation journey.
According to CPPE, the pathway to competition is not the promotion of imports but the encouragement of additional domestic refining investments.
Chief Executive Officer of CPPE, Dr. Muda Yusuf, expressed the views in a press statement, titled, “Import Liberalisation and The Risk of Deindustrialisation in Nigeria.”
Yusuf stated that the refinery did not prevent other investors from entering the sector.
He stated, “Attempts to portray Dangote Refinery as a monopolistic threat are simplistic, fundamentally flawed and grossly unfair. It did not cause the collapse of state-owned refineries. It simply undertook an extraordinary industrial investment at a scale unprecedented in Africa.
“Nigeria should not demonise audacious investment, industrial courage, scale and risk appetite. A country that undermines transformative investment sends deeply troubling signals to both domestic and foreign investors.”
He pointed out that scale created competitiveness, lowered unit costs, deepened value chains, strengthened economic resilience, and should not be criminalised.
He added that large market share, in itself, was not evidence of monopoly abuse, and could be regulated through competition laws and antitrust institutions to prevent abuse of market power.
CPPE said indiscriminate liberalisation regime within a structurally fragile economy was not a pathway to competitiveness but deindustrialisation.
It stated, “It was indiscriminate import liberalisation that precipitated the collapse of many once-thriving domestic industries, including tyre manufacturing giants such as Dunlop and Michelin, as well as textile mills, battery manufacturing firms, automobile assembly plants, pharmaceutical companies and electronics assembly industries.”
CPPE said many of the enterprises were not destroyed by inefficiency alone, but by a policy environment that exposed domestic producers to unfair external competition amid crippling infrastructure deficits, high energy costs, weak logistics systems, prohibitive financing costs, and multiple regulatory burdens.
Yusuf stated, “This is why the implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) could become deeply disruptive for domestic manufacturers if urgent and deliberate steps are not taken to strengthen local production capabilities, improve competitiveness and address the structural impediments confronting Nigerian industries.
“Trade liberalisation without competitiveness is not integration; it is deindustrialisation.”
Yusuf also stated that Nigeria’s recent experience with food importation illustrated the dangers of excessive liberalisation.
He said, “Large-scale food imports disrupted local agricultural value chains, weakened incentives for domestic farmers and undermined investments in local production.
“Many Nigerian farmers are yet to recover from the disruptions created by those policy measures. The refining sector must not be subjected to the same policy error. Temporary import advantages should never be permitted to destroy long-term domestic industrial capabilities.”
He said Nigeria could not achieve meaningful industrialisation without deliberate and sustained support for domestic production through strategic protection, policy consistency, strong domestic value chains, support for local investors and reduction in import dependence.
Yusuf said, “No economy becomes prosperous by importing what it can produce domestically. The future of Nigeria’s economic resilience lies in production, refining, manufacturing and value addition and not in the perpetuation of import dependence.
“Nigeria must, therefore, decide whether it wishes to build a production economy or remain trapped within a consumption economy. History has repeatedly shown that nations which neglect domestic production eventually weaken their currencies, compromise economic sovereignty and expose themselves to severe external vulnerabilities.”
According to him, prosperous economies are built on production, refining, manufacturing, value addition and the strengthening of domestic productive capacity.
He said countries that became excessively dependent on imports inevitably exported jobs, weakened domestic industries, eroded local investments, and mortgaged their economic sovereignty.
“Nigeria must, therefore, avoid drifting into a policy regime that undermines domestic production in the name of competition or liberalisation,” he said.
Yusuf said every serious economy protected its strategic sectors, which was the reason the United States was deploying tariffs and industrial subsidies to support manufacturing competitiveness while China was aggressively protecting its strategic industries.
He said self-reliance was not economic isolationism but economic pragmatism anchored on national interest.
Yusuf explained, “It is the deliberate strengthening of domestic productive capacity in order to reduce vulnerability to external shocks and reinforce long-term economic resilience. A country that cannot refine its own petroleum products despite being a major crude oil producer exposes itself to profound economic vulnerability. Energy security is national security.
“A nation that persistently imports what it should ordinarily produce locally gradually weakens its productive base, destroys industrial capabilities and compromises long-term economic stability. Therefore, the current policy conversation around petroleum product imports appears fundamentally inconsistent with Nigeria’s industrial aspirations.”
