Strike: Manufacturers Suffer N20bn Loss
By Crusoe Osagie
After the four days long national strike ordered by the Nigeria Labour Congress NLC the Organises Private Sector has put the cost of the strike suffered by Manufacturers goes beyond N20 billion.
The the acting Director General of Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN) Mr Jide Mike told THISDAY in Lagos that the manufacturing sector lost at least N5 billion from grounding their operation on each of the four days of the strike bringing the average total cost of the strike to about N20billion.
"Every one knows that the strike had devastating effect on the economy, especially the manufacturing sector," he said. "We had to ground our equipment for four days, in some cases we could not totally shut down our machines because shutting down such machines totally will damage them and so we had to bear the cost of keeping these kind of machines on without producing and an aggregate of all these losses was about 5 billion for each day of the protest," he said.
He explained that the cost of funds with which they run their businesses also accumulated for manufacturers during the period even though there was no business during the period.
Remember that we must pay complete interest on the credit and loans that we have acquired from financial institutions to run our outfits as the days lost to incidents such as strike actions are not factored in when our debts are computed.
Also speaking with THISDAY in Lagos, the President of the Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI) Chief Olusola Faleye stated that though they are not able to give a specific figure of the economic cost of the strike to industrialists in the country the protest had dealt a fatal blow on the profit of industrialist this year.
'The loss suffered by industrialists as a result of the strike is colossal, production processes have been disrupted, raw materials which cannot be preserved beyond a certain period of time went bad and manpower loss was massive," he said.
"Apart from these tangible losses incurred by industrialists, there were several other losses though not very tangible but yet constituted very serious losses to industrialists, for example very important meetings and transactions"
He recalled that the Chamber warned stakeholder to do everything possible to avert the strike because of the huge losses which it portended and the clear understanding of the fatal impact that it will have on the economy which is already very fragile.
Mike further explained that manufacturers who rely on imported raw materials and who produce for export were terribly hit by the strike owing to the fact that transactions that they already had under way were stalled and some of them who could not pick up certain perishable material because of the strike loosed such items.
Faleye called on the government, labour and other stakeholders to embrace the opportunity provided by dialogue to find a solution to the problem and do everything to avoid a re-occurrence of such strike actions that have very grave effect on the economy.
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