A Rivers State, Port Harcourt-based tractor, heavy machinery and farm implements manufacturer is said to be considering an immediate relocation to Rwanda or some other African countries that have been wooing them and having more conducive business atmosphere for tractor and heavy machinery manufacturing.

The manufacturer is said to be alarmed by a provision in the new tax law which has declared duty-free importation of tractors as well as electric cars, products said to be available locally.

Confirming the story, Ibifri A.C Bobmanuel, President of the Rivers Entrepreneurs and Investors Forum (REIF), who is managing director of Bobtrack Tractor Limited, said Rwanda had approached his firm to move over with about 15 years’ concessions including protection for Bobtrack Ltd.

In an exclusive interview in his Garrison Area Office Headquarters in Port Harcourt, Bobmanuel said his firm “is beginning to consider the offer from Rwanda.”

“Maybe we’ll begin to think out of the box or out of the country and see how we could survive. This is because we had an offer from Rwanda, a blank cheque, where they asked us to come over to Rwanda to set up.

“And in part of their discussions we had, they were willing to give us some amount of protectionist agreements for a period of 10 to 20 years for us to get off the ground before anything happens. You know, but in this case, the Nigerian government just sits down and wakes up to do anything they like and it is really affecting our businesses”, he added.

Bobtrack Ltd has capacity for 6,000 tractors per year. Its Port Harcourt factory is said to be 80% ready, while its Nasarawa State facility is assembling for the Northern market.

The MD said the company’s tractors and other implements are found in most leading mechanised farms in Nigeria, and that its Nasarawa Centre is at NASENI, a Federal Government facility.

Findings indicate that Bobtrack Tractors are World beaters, found as hot cake in China and the US, but still blocked from entering those markets, yet the Federal Government of Nigeria is rather opening the doors for dumping through free-duty imports.

Bobmanuel has told a national television team that Bobtrack products are cheaper than imported ones but that removing import duty might remove the competitive edge away from locally-manufactured tractors, which he said, were far better in quality.

He also warned that buying few hundreds of tractors would never make any United States or European manufacturers to relocate to Nigeria because they sell in tens of thousands to States from the US buying tractors there. “They take their agriculture very seriously”.

Should Nigerian manufacturers begin to move out of Nigeria, Bobmanuel warned that jobs are going to be lost. “They’re going to be lost in droves if this comes into effect. And not just jobs being lost in droves, we would waste a whole lot of our effort.

“Some of the governors travel abroad to buy 50 or 100 tractors and see it as a big deal. But no tractor manufacturing company in Europe or in America or in China will sell you 100 tractors and you think you’ve done something big to them that they would come and set up in Nigeria. Nobody does that because of the size of their market, and they understand the importance of agriculture.”

If you go to China, he said, there’s no stretch of land in China that is not under cultivation. “China is arguably two times the size of Africa, but I’m telling you there’s no strand of land, no one square meter of land that is not being cultivated for agricultural purposes. And China has a ban on even exporting cultivated products out of China.

“Meaning you go to farm, cultivate and you are not allowed to export it. If you put one bag of grain of rice in a ship or in a plane out of China, you’ll be locked up for doing that. Those are countries that understand where they’re going to. Because if a man is not well-fed, that man cannot think. They understand that if a man goes to war with all your ammunition and you don’t have food in your stomach, you can’t fight the war.”

He also condemned the zero duty on electric car by the FG. “Now, you look at the electric cars matter we’re talking about. Today they have come up with a policy of zero duty on electric cars. Who does that? Today, Bobtrack has pivoted into electric cars. (You can see a handful of electric cars out in our showroom here.)

“We have our own brand of electric cars that we’re supposed to launch in three months. Now the factory that we’re building has a section for electric and the other section is for tractors and implements. So all of these dreams, just one government policy flushes all of that down the (BusinessDay)

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