We have seen this before. Why do we go back to this treacherous path, like a criminal back to the scene of the crime? The incompetent government of Ebonyi State, led by the gerontocrat governor, rebuffed all efforts by investors to take over tha pioneer Nigerian Cement Company Limited, NIGERCEM, located at Nkalagu. Only the deaf would not gave heard of the many obstacles placed a decade earlier in the way of Dangote Cement Company Plc when it initially offered to resuscitate the moribund Benue Cement Co Limited. Ultimately the people of Benue, (perhaps including Sen Solomon Gemade and my old friend Engr Solomon Nyagba), had to go crawling back to seek the intervention of Dangote Cement. The rest is history. The details at Ashaka Cement Plant in Gombe State were a little less dire before they surrendered to the management and marketing clout of the Lafarge Group, successor to the WAPCO/Blue Circle subsidiary in Nigeria.
What can one say about the Plateau Breweries whose board held out in an unnecessarily long ego massage that took the company nowhere, before Guinneas was reluctantly let in? This situation is even better that Prince Arthur Eze's Premier Breweries at Onitsha, which for inexpl I cable reasons has been shuttered for two decades now. To add insult to injury, the SAB/Miller Group built a new plant a shouting distance away.
Now, can anyone explain to me why the Federal Government of Nigeria is now in the business of promising the obviously happy people of Ebonyi State that the NIGERCEM plant will soon bounce back to life. How does it concern the FG?
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