FrieslandCampina is a Dutch multinational dairy cooperative which is based in Amersfoort, Netherlands. Largely, it is “owned” by dairy farmers. What happens is this: you produce 2 trucks of milk, I produce 5, and another produces 8, etc. Because we are small in our capacities, no one pays attention. But if we all come together, we become BIG and can move global. Those farmers did just that and today, they have one of the largest companies in the world with annual revenue in excess of $11billion.
Can we run the same playbook in Aba? Use a brand name, and ask those small shoemakers to feed into the brand. As Naira continues to fade, many will buy “local”, and a business model that can feed that pipeline has a promise. I suggest a name – “Aba” or “Enyimba” leather products brand, to be owned and controlled by men and women in the leather industry, within a cooperative.
People, you can use aggregation to get scale and drive orchestration in markets. That name-brand provides one certainty: designer, we will buy whatever you produce provided it is within standards. Once that is there, those men and women will scale because the demand side has been fixed.
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Comment: This is old skool Ndubuisi Ekekwe… as I read the article, I thought, the old words worth is back, demanding big attention span from readers… until I looked at the date of the article and saw it was 2017 !
Well if an article 5 years old has been resurrected by this analyst with a penchant for business detail, it can mean only one thing… the content is just as valid today, and Aba has not changed.
Is that a good or a bad thing? It is bad because the artisans are not seeing just reward from their labour.
The problem however, that production is often by hand, or at least hand finished, and that imperfections exist, would be a selling point in other markets globally.
Top finds for numismatists and philatelists for instance are coins or postage stamps with minting or printing flaws. Where labour is at a premium, small imperfections can be seen as proof of handicraft rather than mass production. Indeed, specialist machine changes are now available to deliberately introduce small process flaws to give the hand made look.
It may not be that Aba has lost its way in being what Nigeria needs. It may be that Nigeria has failed to be what Aba needs.
No one is a prophet in their own land.
My Response: Aba is fading and that affected my village Ovim. Ovim train station was the largest train station in our area serving many communities. Typically, from Aba, every train is expected to stop at Umuahia, Uzuakoli and then Ovim, bypassing some small stations.
Ovim served Ohafia, Arochukwu, Ahaba, and many other communities. As that was happening, businessmen went and built houses around the station. But with the train station gone, everything has collapsed. The hub is gone and Ovim lost a strategic positioning which was used to supply garri to Enugu via rail!
Every kid rode a Raleigh bicycle which was used to move foodstuffs from Oriendu Market to the train station! It was great.
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