Nigeria’s Minister of Commerce and Industry, Chief Achike Udenwa, has admitted that Nigeria has been unable to take much advantage of the Africa Growth Opportunities Act (AGOA) to export manufactured goods to the US.
“Unfortunately, Nigeria has not been able to leverage this much. It is not that we are not doing anything but what we are doing is quite negligible,’’ Udenwa told journalists on Sunday in Abuja.
To redress the situation, he said the ministry had been holding seminars to educate Nigerians on the demands of AGOA.
“The AGOA program is to offer training to Nigerian exporters to enable them to access the US market through good finishing and packaging of their products.
Udenwa said the problem was the impatience of the Nigerian.
“When we came back from a meeting in Kenya, we held a seminar for the stakeholders because it was discovered that most of our problem was that Nigerians were not patient enough.
“We don’t finish well, we don’t package well and we are expecting these goods to be exported to America,’’ he said.
Udenwa said exporters must know the minimum standard required for a product to enter the US market and must ensure that the finishing and packaging were good enough.
He noted that the Nigerian Export Promotion Council (NEPC) was working “seriously’’ with exporters on how to ensure good finishing and finding a market abroad.
The minister also said that the NEPC had begun working with garment producers with a view to building their capacity and making them more competitive in the production of apparels for export.
He said the initiative had been rewarded with the first export of garments to the US in July 2008.
He said the initiative was in line with Nigerian government’s policy of increasing the productive capacity of the manufacturing sector as well as increasing the country’s non-oil export earnings and decrease importation of consumer goods.
Source African Press Agency
