Following the ongoing forex crisis and illegal importation of tomato paste in the country, the Dangote Group has announced the shutting down of its new tomato paste plant in Nigeria due to a shortage of dollars needed to import raw materials.
A Senior Executive Officer in Dangote Group, Edwin Devakumar, told an online news agency in an interview yesterday, this was the second such closure in months.
Last year, the management of Ericso Foods Limited had also shut down its factories across the country over shortage of forex from the Central Bank of Nigeria. Consequently, the closed down of Dangote Tomato Processing Company Kano and Ericso Foods Limited would have severe blow on government’s diversification agenda of the country’s economy.
In addition, this has also left Savannah Foods having the only tomato paste factory in active business.“Where the foreign exchange is not available, we are cutting down our operations. For example …
we had a tomato-based processing plant, we have shut it down,” Devakumar told Reuters in an interview yesterday. “The dollar scarcity has also forced Dangote to cut down other food businesses such as flour milling, sugar refining and vegetable oil refining,” Devakumar said, adding the tomato plant could reopen once the company was able to source raw tomatoes locally.”
Indeed, President Muhammadu Buhari, elected in 2015 on a platform of fixing a country mismanaged for decades, frequently speaks of ending Nigeria’s dependency on oil exports by boosting food production, repeating his mantra: “We must produce what we eat”. But Nigeria is mired in recession and struggling with dollar shortages due to low oil prices.
