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Speaking at the 31st Nigerian Economic Summit in Abuja on Tuesday, Oyeyimika Adeboye, Managing Director of Mondelez West Africa, urged the government to ensure stronger policy coherence and regional consistency to safeguard manufacturers from the recurring economic shocks disrupting Nigeria’s industrial sector.
Speaking during a panel on economic stability, Adeboye noted that while no economy is immune to challenges such as inflation or devaluation, Nigeria’s repeated crises have taken a significant toll on its manufacturing sector.
“There’s no economy that is free of devaluation or inflation. Even the most advanced economies also go through that,” she said.
“But what must we do as a nation, given that we are in that? It’s the fourth one that we’ve been through.”
The Mondelez chief highlighted that across Nigeria’s four major economic downturns, manufacturing has borne the brunt, with factory shutdowns, job losses, and investor exits being recurring consequences.
“When I look at what has happened to manufacturers in those four [crises], manufacturing has been the biggest impacted, where factories are shut down, where investors have left Nigeria,” she said. “What can we do to ensure that doesn’t keep happening? Because it really doesn’t set us in the right space.”
Adeboye urged the government to address bureaucratic inefficiencies that frustrate business operations, describing the experience of having to obtain multiple approvals from a single government agency as counterproductive.
Calling for policy stability and inter-agency collaboration, Adeboye emphasised the need for clear and consistent rules that endure beyond political transitions.
She further advocated for a more harmonised regional approach under ECOWAS, comparing the disparity in industrial policy between Ghana and Nigeria to “chalk and cheese.”
“We make some products in Ghana, and we make some products in Nigeria. We’re in ECOWAS, but we don’t have an equal, consistent policy that helps the whole region,” she said. “If we were to be serious about our economic agenda as a region, we should do what the EU is doing—strengthen the economies of member states.”
Adeboye’s remarks reinforced the call for policy coherence, economic stability, and regional alignment as vital ingredients to restoring investor confidence and sustaining manufacturing growth in West Africa’s largest economy.
