The President of the Association of Automobile Boatyards Transport Equipment and Allied Employers of Nigeria (AABTEAN), Adekunle Jaiyesimi, has stressed the need for the Director-General of National Automotive Design and Development Council (NADDC), Oluwemimo Joseph Osanipin, to carry stakeholders along to move the automotive sector forward.

The NADDC was established by Act. No. 6 of 2014 primarily to initiate, recommend, supervise and regulate policies and programmes for locally manufactured vehicles and components.

Fielding questions from journalists at the 45th AABTEAN yearly general meeting held in Ota Ogun state, he said: “It is not just to bring people within the academia to fashion out a policy that will be detrimental to the workings of real practitioners.”

Saying there is a need to attract investors to the automobile industry, he observed that since 2014, nothing much has been achieved.

Jaiyesimi said: “We believe the DG is well experienced. He is coming from the industry. Previously, we have been having people that are not in the private sector. Our belief is that whatever he is doing now, he should be able to get it right. But he needs to carry the real practitioners within the automotive sector along, so that for once, we can get out of this protracted formulation of policy and get to the actual implementation.

“When the government started this policy in 2014, maybe the mistake they made was to register anybody that comes around submitting applications for registration. It is only in Nigeria that you see the regulatory authorities registering 54 assemblers. That’s unprecedented anywhere in the world. We have briefcase businessmen coming around to take advantage of this policy. For serious people that invested, almost 60 per cent of them are no longer interested in going forward because the economic terrain is not suitable for investment.”