With the commissioning of the Ewekoro II plant it is not possible that cement prices will crash. What are the fundamentals that will crash cement prices for ordinary Nigerians who hope to own their own houses?
There are several factors influencing the price of cement in Nigeria. One among them is availability of cement which plays a significant role in its pricing. You know in the past we had price variations due to the fact that there is not enough cement in the country. So this commissioning of Ewekoro II plant and subsequent production will bring into the market cement and by the way stabilise prices.
Our prices have been stable over the time. We have not increased our price in the last months but you know the market forces dictate the situation. Now what we are talking about is the cost of production of cement and the cost of transportation and distribution to the end user. So this plant that has been commissioned will hopefully reduce the price of cement, but of course we can not do everything alone in terms of lowering the price, the transporters have to do their beats and the distributors have to be effective and efficient, so that altogether we can achieve lower price of cement over time for our customers.
There was a time the Federal Government met with cement manufacturers following public outcry that the prices were outrageous and gave them a deadline to crash the prices, but it seemed nothing really happened?
No there was an impact. If I remember well, it was at a time the price of cement was at a very high level in the market exactly because of the problem of availability of cement.
Now what we have done is that we have increased the capacity of our plant, we have pushed production as much as possible, as a result, the whole industry managed to put prices under control and to make sure that the product became much more at the reach of the end user. There was a big influence on the price.
With the commissioning of this plant which indicates progress on your part, hope your host community will benefit from this progress and you will endeavour to put into practice the local content law?
First, we ensured that the youths of our host community associated with the building of the plant by asking our main contractors, Chinese contractors, which built it to employ as much as possible from our host community. That was really the first action we took. And then we have employed 95 percent of Nigerians in the new plant, so this is a very big achievement I believe, and of course we need to train the people, we need to make them competent to run the plant, we need to be careful and upgrade them to manage the equipment here. So, this requires a lot of training, we have sent people abroad to get the requisite knowledge, we have trained them here also in our training school, and we wish to do that even more in the future to develop managers over time in our operations in Nigeria.
We have a particular policy in Lafarge which favours the training of youths in building trade, like block making, in mason, construction, which is really where we have a lot of knowledge. We have a training centre here dedicated to our Nigerian operations where we train mostly our new employees; we take training and re-training of our staff seriously. Here we train not only staff from Ewekoro but also those from Ashaka. We actually have invested much on training because we know its importance in a workforce. I bet you the training centre has been a success story, having dedicated our wealth of knowledge in producing quality staff. It is part of our building strong value, which is developing people. We are also mulling extending the capacity of the centre to include people who are not employees of Lafarge, but will be interested to develop technologically for other endeavours. So it’s fantastic idea dishing out training. Originally, we used to train our people abroad, but now we think it’s important we develop our own training capacity.
Hope you are working towards keying into the Federal Government agenda of reversing the import dependent nature of the economy as you increase capacity?
First and foremost, we are looking at the possibility of shipping cement further away from our plants; to further regions of the country, for example we are looking at using the train very effectively to send cement to Kano and other northern states. We are also looking at the possibility to ship further from our existing plants to other neighbouring countries like Niger and Chad. We will of course continue to do that because we believe there is a good demand in these markets. And again ship the product further away to other West African countries and further to African countries, you know we are not so far from the port at Apapa, Lagos. So we are looking at the possibility to do that.
How are you tackling stiff competition?
We don’t think everyday about competition. What we do is definitely to follow our ambition at Lafarge: to be the leader in this country in terms of people, in terms of competencies, we can bring so much and I think Nigerians will recognise that we have a very important role to play in this market. Competition will always put challenge on us. I think it is good there are competitions. Elephant Cement has always been known for its extremely good quality. The strongest cement is Elephant Cement for sure. Beyond that, what we do is to develop specific qualities for specific applications of cement, so cement which is good for the making of the bases of a building is not the same that you use in making blocks. So we have recognised that and adapted the quality of the specification of our products to each application. In fact, Elephant Cement is the best for any application. It is a five-decade old formidable brand of impeccable standard and quality. It backs solution provision with power, maturity, resilience, durability and reliability.
It is interesting that you have built and commissioned a power plant with a capacity of 90 megawatts…
You know we have been operating our plant in Nigeria for several decades and we know that there is no constant supply of electricity from the national grid. So we have used in the past complementary small IPP to support the grid but the system was not totally efficient, this is why we decided to have a power plant and dedicate it to cover all our needs, not only this plant but all our plants and also we have additional capacity to sell to neighbouring industries and to the national grid. We are using 60 megawatts and the remaining 30 megawatts we are ready to sell. We have started discussion with the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) to be able to get the licence to sell these additional megawatts, so we are waiting for NERC to tell us what to do.
Hope all these growths will rub off positively on your shareholders?
Well I think Nigerian shareholders have recognised already the value of Lafarge WAPCO, they have seen its share price increasing in the last months and I think they see so much potential in the company and trust that the company will deliver on its promises, Lafarge is reputed to deliver on its promises. And we will do that of course by delivering not only in this year but also the years ahead, they (shareholders) are expected to benefit in terms of good dividends and we are working hard to make that possible. In fact, the future looks bright as Lafarge approaches its next decades with great sense of responsibility to its stakeholders, the built industry sector and the nation at large.
Hope you have tailored your operations to be environmentally friendly?
In fact, the first thing here is that we have ensured that we operate with the highest respect for the environment as we have tried as much as possible to produce less emission. So we have the bag filter which prevents the dust from flaring outside and it is very effective. Also we use bio-mass, it is very important. It reduces the impact of the CO2 emission.
On health and safety…
They are our core priorities. We have done so much in the last one year in making sure that we are proactive in our operation in these directions. We have a super modern clinic in Ewekoro to take care of our people. We are working now on road safety because we see too many accidents on the roads not so much of our staff, but our contractors and truck drivers.
