The Executive Secretary/CEO of the National Sugar Development Council (NSDC), Kamar Bakrin, said the sugar industry has the potential to significantly improve the economy through improved employment and rural livelihoods.

The NSDC boss said a fully-developed sugar industry could tackle Nigeria’s security challenges from the root cause by creating jobs and taking development to the rural areas.

Bakrin said this during a strategic meeting between the NSDC and the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) at the Customs Headquarters in Abuja.

Addressing the Comptroller-General of Customs, Bashir Adewale Adeniyi, and other senior officials of the service, the NSDC boss said modern sugar estates are designed to generate their own electricity independently of the national grid while supplying excess power for national use.

“If Nigeria succeeds in developing a proper sugar sector, one of the things we would do is convert an annual outflow of over one billion dollars into jobs, security and industrialisation.

“The sector can create 250,000 direct jobs and an additional 750,000 indirect jobs across its value chain, primarily across about 12 states. The beauty of it is that these are rural jobs, not city jobs,” he said.

He also linked the development of sugar estates to improved national security, noting that such projects create massive employment opportunities for young people who might otherwise remain vulnerable to criminal activities and social unrest.

“When you have sugar projects, you don’t have unrest or any security challenge because you create so many jobs for the youths.

“A sugar estate provides its own power; it does not rely on the national grid. As a matter of fact, it contributes to the national grid. A sugar estate consumes only about 50 per cent of the energy it produces, while the rest can be injected into the national grid,” Bakrin said.

He explained that beyond sugar production, the sector offers a major opportunity for rural industrialisation, energy security, infrastructure development and economic diversification.

Bakrin said the Federal Government is determined to reverse the country’s over-reliance on sugar imports by encouraging large-scale investments in domestic production through predictable policies and stronger institutional collaboration.

The NSDC said investors, considering investing billions of dollars in sugar projects, require confidence that approved policies and incentives would be transparently and consistently enforced.

The NCS boss said the service fully supported the sugar sector transformation agenda, describing the projected energy contribution of the industry as a major national economic opportunity.

“The potential for job creation, security, rural development, and the added value in terms of energy that we can use speaks directly to Nigeria’s economic priorities,” Adeniyi stated.

He assured the NSDC of Customs’ readiness to strengthen intelligence sharing, data transparency, quota enforcement and operational collaboration to ensure the effective implementation of the NSMP II.

The two institutions reaffirmed their commitment to work together on five key areas with a view to resolving longstanding bottlenecks around the sustainability of sugar estates and the attraction of critical investments into the sector.