‘Nigeria imports 98% of wheat used in making bread’

President of Premium Breadmakers Association of Nigeria (PBAN), Engr. Emmanuel Onuorah in a chat with Daily Trust during the recent PBAN Day-Out, an annual gathering of breadmakers and bakery owners speaks on the state of the breadmaking industry and why the sector is bleeding.   What brought about the theme of “The Business of Baking: […]

President of Premium Breadmakers Association of Nigeria (PBAN), Engr. Emmanuel Onuorah in a chat with Daily Trust during the recent PBAN Day-Out, an annual gathering of breadmakers and bakery owners speaks on the state of the breadmaking industry and why the sector is bleeding.

 

What brought about the theme of “The Business of Baking: Pathways to Profit, Productivity and Growth” during this year’s event?

For you to do anything you must have the finances. All right, the finances are stifling us; interest rates are astronomical. They are way, way out of our reach, you know. You can’t go to the bank and get a single-digit loan. All their loans are in two digits and not just in two digits, 30 per cent and above. How does any business survive with that? All right, the macro and the microeconomic indicators and indices are not favourable to bread-making.

 

Most of our inputs are imported into the country. 98% of the wheat we consume in Nigeria, we use in making bread, is imported. We do about 5.1 million metric tons of wheat in Nigeria every year, while Nigeria is only able to produce 300,000 metric tons out of the required 5.1 million. So, where is backward integration? How will Nigerians get jobs?

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For every wheat you import into Nigeria, from Russia, everywhere else, Ukraine, a war-torn country still producing, we cannot do the same here in this country. So, you know, one would be sounding like a broken record. We’ve been making a lot of noise.

We’ve been talking, we’ve been engaging, we’ve been doing advocacy, but it’s just like, I mean, you are hitting your head on the wall. The Federal Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investment should wake up. It’s not about sitting in Abuja. It’s about doing the right things to grow this economy. And bread makers are suffering.

 

You said something about the number of bread makers, bakery that have shut down, can you give us the statistics in recent time?

No, I would not be able to give you the number for the industry but for my members, we were doing about a hundred and something thousand bakeries, but now we are less than 60,000. This was between post-Covid-19 and now. Since COVID era, it has been torrid for breadmakers and that is just for my association.

e are other associations. I think the mortality rates cut across the industry. And this is not just for only bakers, it’s for every manufacturing concern in Nigeria, it’s a case of woe.

The other day I was listening to the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN), they were talking about $2 trillion in inventory they have in their stores. There is this consciousness of taxing people to death? You know, taxation doesn’t grow any economy. It only lies in the pocket of politicians.

Taxation diminishes an economy. For you to be able to tax the people, you must give them wealth. It is the wealth you give to them that you tax from.

If the government had insisted on the 15 per cent tariff on importation of fuel, there would have been a multiplier effect on businesses. We use diesel, despite the Band A that they increased our tariff by more than 2,000%, but you can’t even get the energy to work with. If the lights are there, the voltage is low. So, we depend on diesel to run our own energy. We try to do alternative energyby using solar. Can you pay for it?

My association is working with another company to see how we can get my members to get alternate power to the public power because with that we will be able to get lithium batteries, get energy and solar panels that can help them run their 50 to 60% of the operation. You would drop energy costs by as much as even 60%. And the other excess that you’re paying to the DISCOS is ploughed back into the business.

 

As an association, what have you done to address some of these issues with the government?

Well, for us as an association, you know, we don’t import directly, but the people that are bringing these inputs for us – the margarine, calcium propionate, wheat flour and all of that, but first of all, I would like to give kudos to President Bola Tinubu. We shouted and the president lifted the 15% wheat import duty and the Value Added Tax on wheat and grains.

This was as a result of our advocacy and the president heard our cry and that has helped us. That is why you are seeing the stability in pricing of bread. You know, Q3 2003 to Q4, 2024, the volatility was too much.

Bread prices were increasing. At a time as a business, I increased the prices of bread about four times in a month. How do you sustain that? At that period, we had to shed weight, lay off some workers so that we could right size and ensure that we remain in business and sustainable.

 

Also, one of the presenters is talking about reducing import dependence and considering that we have a vast arable land to grow some of these inputs, how can we leverage on this land resource especially to grow our local wheat?

So, for you to do anything in Nigeria today, you must get security rights. Who goes to the farm and wants to die? Do you know that in the north that owns over 60% of the land in Nigeria they can’t go to farms today?

The government must protect Nigerians because Nigerians across divides are dying in droves. If you are going across the roads today, for us that we take our bread far, the roads are in deplorable conditions.

Sometimes you go, your truck will fall on the way, you lose all your goods. If you don’t have Goods In Transit (GIT) insurance, you are done for. The roads are bad. Insecurity is rife; the farmers cannot go to farm. Then how can you even do backward integration? We must get security rights. If you fix security, you fix everything.

 

There are concerns that bread prices remain high despite the drop in price of flour, what is your response to this?

How much has come down in the price of flour? N500. Flour is still selling above N55,000. We have not increased bread prices in the last one year. Energy cost shot everything up again. Diesel prices have not come down. If all the prices come down, we will drop our price. My energy cost before now was like N600,000 to N800,000 but now it is close to N3 Million plus. Even in the midst of this, check the weight of our bread, the weight has increased substantially too.