Obviously, a 50- year journey is full of ups and downs; what were the challenges over the years?
Yes the challenges are still there. We have to look at it in the economic perspective which is a reflection of state of things in the country- in terms of operational aspect, we have finance challenges. In terms of the skills, personnel and customers. Don’t forget the equipment and machines are not being produced here because Nigeria has not gotten to that level. Though we now hear vehicles are being assembled here in the country, we hope if we can begin to assembly we get to a level where we will be able to produce those components. If your machine is down or faulty, you have to import. Even the raw materials; papers and chemicals, we don’t produce them here so in the process of stocking and importing, you have constraints to deal with especially with the way Nigerian port system is. No paper mill in the country is in operation. About three were established by government but because of the inefficiency in the system, they collapsed.
Now I go to finance. In other parts of the world, the banking system do support the industries and finance and develop business but our banking institutions are not ready to give long term loans. They want the money tomorrow and you can’t blame them, things are not certain. They give you facilities and if the exchange rate goes higher tomorrow, they won’t ask you to pay same amount, you still have to pay the same principal with more interest. The fact is that the banking sector is not operated in a way to help the industries and they are not willing to lend as much as they are supposed to. Printing is capital intensive. You can’t raise or make all the money in a short time. How much facilities can you get that will give you five years span. It is difficult to get it in Nigerian banks.
The maximum they will do for you is three years. When do they expect you to get the revenue? Print industries need long term facilities. So these people that are importing the finished product will actually get bank support, immediately they import they return their money. But the danger there is, we are not growing, we are not developing; that is why we have so much unemployment, and industries are not thriving. And as a result of the financial constraints, you cannot produce as much as you wish.
For 49 years, this is where we are. We have grown but we should have been in a better position than we are now if all these issues were addressed earlier. In terms of the needed skills, in the past we used to have one or two higher institutions offering printing as a course. Even in those days when things were better, all they could offer is OND and sometimes offer HND- they didn’t even have enough resources. So if the school system is not able to provide the basis for training and the needed skills, the country is losing. There won’t be competent personnel to run the industry.
How are you coping with these challenges?
We have to invest in training our staff and then at a very high cost because we have to send people abroad. We also have to establish a training department and structure in the system to be able to develop our own workforce. That is how we are able to cope. Sometimes we have to invite people from abroad to come and train our personnel. On the part of the customers, there are customers; that are prompted by the benefit of going abroad, no matter how much you try to manage the situation, they still go abroad. In Nigeria, it is not the best person that gets the job, so you find a lot of inefficiency in that area, a lot of compromise that will not enable you get returns on your investment. During the 2011 election, I remember, when they were not able to supply ballot papers; that was when people got to know that we were to import and it was the indigenous printers that saved the situation. So was it necessary to have gone abroad? And the same thing might play out in 2015 election. But we have been getting in touch with the relevant authorities on the need for them to look inward.
Do you feel Nigerian printers can handle such sophisticated and sensitive materials without delay or compromise?
Nigeria printers have the capacity to do what their foreign printers are doing and I’m saying this authoritatively because we use the same equipment and materials. We also have trained hands that are as efficient as they are. When you have the facilities to produce the same kind and the customers or relevant bodies, for one reason or the other are not just willing to give you the opportunity, how will you improve or show your capacity? That is why most print outfits find it difficult to pay their staff, even if you are able to pay them you are not able to pay them well. They begin to take people on part-time basis so the job is not guaranteed. When I have a job, I will call you and when I don’t have, you stay at home and manage because that is the only way we can survive. If you don’t do that how are you going to pay people when you are not having jobs? So it is a very difficult situation.
I learnt you now have subsidiaries, what prompted this step?
We are a group and we have three subsidiaries though event are overtaking the business form so we have even changed the name. We don’t call it Academic Press Specialized Print Limited but Academy Press Business Forms Limited. Others are Lithotec Limited and West African Book Publishers Limited. Essentially why we set up those subsidiaries is that the printing business starts from one process to the other. Abroad, a firm doesn’t necessarily engage its business in all the processes. They just take a part and allow another business to take another part. But in our own environment, things don’t work that way because if you say you want to print a job and you go to the next man for the printing, you go to the another man to do the finishing process, then printing and you go to another firm to do the delivery, people here will think you are not serious. But there is actually a benefit in doing that because what you end up doing is that you will be a master of what you do because there is need for specialisation in every area.
If you concentrate on that area, you become a specialist. But if you then pull everything together, that’s being the jack of all trade, master of none. For the level we are, we also feel the need to specialise -having people focus on different areas, hence, the subsidiaries engage in particular aspects of the business, servicing the other part and to that extent, they are able to concentrate and specialise in that area of business.
So the three subsidiaries are really doing printing. They are not doing anything else but we have segmented the stages and process of printing for each of the company to become specialist and that’s how we have been operating.
Some scholars/ printers see advent of technology as a threat to the business while others see it as a blessing. What is your opinion?
Advent of technology is a mixture of both. The opportunities are still there despite technological change. Whether we like it or not, we just have to appreciate the advent of technology. But the threat is real so you cannot just stand where you are; you just have to move along. Part of the threat is that some aspects of the job have been taken over by them and so you upgrade your technology and begin to do the same thing in a different way but some you are not able to because it becomes totally a different business . In other words, If people have been reading printed matter on paper and these things go into tablet or computer now, you don’t go into computer production or computer technology, it is different from paper printing . So it is not something that you can now say I’m a computer producer so that people can buy your products. But the advantage is, unlike in the past when we used to produce films and then produce plates then print, technology came and took over the whole process- films were eliminated and things are done better .
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