Why we’re investing $1 billion in Nigeria, by chairman, Colechurch group



Diminutive and unassuming, he does not just pride himself as the first chartered Electrical Engineer in Nigeria but matter of fact, is the founder and group chairman of Colechurch International Limited, a project, promotion, management and finance company which he founded in the UK in 1976 and was chief executive from then till about eight years ago, when he handed the job to a Briton who now heads the company in London.
Today, Colechurch is active in 32 countries worldwide and has head office in London and a sub-head office in the US.

The group has an asset base of about $300m and annual turnover last year was $125m while this year’s is expected to be $140m. The staff strength worldwide is 1,800.
Onyemelukwe has an impressive and perhaps, intimidating profile. He bagged an Engineering degree in 1956, from the University of Leeds and an Economics degree of London University in 1960. He has written and lectured widely on the power industry, economic development and growth.

His books include Problems of Industrial Planning and Management in Nigeria, Men and Management in Contemporary Africa, Economic Underdevelopment: An Insider View and The Science of Economic Development and Growth: The Theory of Factor Proportions.

As a non-executive chairman now, he is at the company’s US office, where he operates from. A member of various institutions of electrical and mechanical engineers, fuel technologists and so on, Onyemelukwe has brought his company to Nigeria to invest. The total project cost is about $I billion, but the economist cum engineer, has his share of tales of frustrations and assessment of the Nigerian environment as a potential investor.
For example, he cited bureaucratic bottlenecks and lack of data/statistics to aid a potential investor as part of the frustrations in Nigeria.
He describes the country as one of the poorest 10 in the world, stressing that a lot of Nigerians are lazy and those with money hide them.

His story
In 1961, I had to return to Nigeria because of the nation’s independence. I was then made the chief engineer of the Electricity Corporation of Nigeria. In 1961, the British handed over to us, so I stayed in the country till about 1972, then went back to UK in 1976 where I founded Colechurch. We as a company have been in existence for more than a quarter of a century now. We did initially come to Nigeria in 1978/79 and we were at that time interested in projects here. We did a $200m set of projects in Benue State but soon after that, the military came in and as a result of that we left the country. So since 1980, we have not been in this country. That made us go international. So, its only when the civilian government of Obasanjo came in; even it took us some time again to watch whether the democracy is for real. So it’s really in the last two years that Colechurch came back into this country and even at that, I wouldn’t say we are fully here, because we are still exploring the position here. The truth is that, in coming to this country, I feel that the country has not explored its potentials. I feel that the country should have moved much further than we all dreamt at independence. One felt that there are lot of things that should be done. At the end of the day, the foreign investment is not coming with the speed we expected even though the government is trying all it can and should be congratulated for all the efforts it is making in that direction. We must know in reality that the foreign investors are all heading towards China and you will be surprised the amount of foreign investment going to the US. All these places are attracting foreign investment so that compared to many of them, the African countries don’t have much chance to really get foreign investment to make a lot of difference to the economic development.

So, one of the reasons we come to Nigeria is to see what to do because we are in project development and promotion and management, to assist the country to grow in the area of industrial development. My company is also very active in project management and development in the oil and gas sector and also in the area of power because I started as a power man and of course, in industry. What we are doing is divided into two levels. We came in here and found that even the small, medium industrial sector in this country hardly had anything to write home about, which is a pity. So, we decided initially to set up what we call a bureau of small, medium industrial promotion. This is the first of its kind because we specialise on industrial promotion in the small, medium sector.

The trouble is that the small, medium industrial sector in the country is not very buoyant. We have a lot of unemployment in the country. Graduates pass out; four or five years, they haven’t got a job and it is only by developing the real sector, the productive sector that we can make any difference to this situation. The bureau is highly specialised. The trouble is that we are toying about with small, medium industrial activities. People think that running an industry is more or less the same thing as trading. It doesn’t involve anything. You buy a machine and install it and the next day, you want to make millions of naira but it’s not like that. So, this bureau is to attempt to assist entrepreneurs in this field. There is no reason whatsoever that goods come from other countries and are cheaper than our people are making it in the small, medium industry.

There’s no reason for that. People say it’s electricity and all the infrastructure the government hasn’t provided. To me, that is a whitewash situation. Afterall, if you are an undeveloped country, you are then not expected to have all the developed things -electricity that flows 365 days in a week, roads all tarred, telecommunications all fantastic. If you have all that, then, you are not undeveloped but most people want all those things before they can get into small, medium industry. That’s nonsense.

And this feeling persists that, it is government that is holding up industrial development. The reason is that people are lazy in the country. They are not ready to work. They are not ready to attempt to develop a technology base - indigenous technology I call it. People are not ready to do that. That is one of the reasons we have an MoU (Memorandum of Understanding) with the Federal Ministry of Science and Technology on behalf of the Federal Government. There is a lot of research being carried out here for years and nothing to show for it on the field. So this MoU is for us to work with the ministry to start commercialising some of their findings. If we use a finding from them, immediately it uses things in terms of how to utilise the facilities here - the resources, the manpower and the rest of it. So that is what we mean by indigenous technology.

We are trying to promote this. If we are bringing any technology from outside, it doesn’t have to be the way people carry foreign technology and bring here without seeing whether it is relevant or not. And up till now, there is no technology and people simply order a machine from overseas. He doesn’t know what is inside it. He doesn’t know the position. He doesn’t know what cost, the thing will produce the good for. He installs it. The next day, he finds that what he is producing is more expensive than the one from outside, then he shouts and says it is the government that causes that. So that’s one arm of what we are doing in the bureau. The other one is on the bigger end of the scale - the large projects. [b][/b]
Our company has done a lot of projects worldwide. We have a number of major projects, mainly industrial, that we are planning. We have major projects we are planning to invest in this country and either sometimes alone or in conjuction with other foreign companies. I’m driven because I’m a Nigerian to do it. Then I can easily attract others who know us to follow us and come here and we have all sorts of associations with them. So, that’s one major thing we are trying to do.

Education
I stayed two years in University College, Ibadan (1951-53). At that time, there was no Engineering here. So every year, there was entrance for the whole country. When I took the entrance in 1951, I was the first in the country, so we got into Ibadan and they selected about 10 of us that were for science and they said the government will send us later to do Engineering. We spent two years for what they called Intermediate Science and after that, we then were sent overseas and I can say today, that I’m the first chartered Electrical Engineer in Nigeria. I went to Leeds University 1953-56 and got a degree. In 1956, I joined the then Central Electricity Generating Board in U.K. It was the organisation that undertook the generation, the transmission of electricity throughout the U.K at a time. It was a big monopolistic organisation. There I worked and became head of planning division at the headquarters. It was from there that I didn’t know people from this country were reading all the things and journals I was publishing overseas. People were very nationalistic then. One day, they called me at the headquarters where I was and said some directors of Electricity Corporation of Nigeria want to see me. So, I said what did they want? Eventually, they managed to get to me and said they wanted me to come back to Nigeria. I said I was not interested because I was quite comfortable. They finally got in touch with my mother who I hadn’t seen for 11 years and she started making hell for me. She said if she died, her death was on my neck. That is why I finally returned to Nigeria and took up the job of chief engineer.


Government’s effort in attracting foreign investment
Government has constraints. Government is not everything. At the end of the day, it is the private people. Government can only facilitate. I don’t like this idea of always saying government, government.
A lot of us are lazy. We don’t want to do the work. People with money hide them. They want to go into trade. They want to go into property. They want to go and get shares in the bank because they expect a quick turnover. So, what do you expect government to do? The government is going all over the world trying to get foreign investment but I told you the constraint they are facing because every country in this world now wants foreign investment. Have you seen the adverts they are making in England to get foreign investment? Have you seen the adverts Germans are making to attract foreign investment? Have you seen the amount of state governments in America trying to attract foreign investment? The Australians are looking for foreign investment. When all this is happening, why does somebody particularly want to come to Africa? We have to put it in context. The people here have to get up on their bootstraps and get working. That’s what we are trying to do. That is why I’m forcing my company to come and invest here, not because it is the most attractive. We are in 32 countries of the world. I’m dragging the board of my company by the neck to get here but there are lots of problems here that makes it difficult for the average foreign investor to come here. So we are now trying to work with the Nigerian Investment Promotion Commission to assist them because it is alright to call a foreign investor to come in here and you might get him interested. When he wants to go about it, he finds that there are no facilities to assist him. If he wants to do a quick feasibility study, he doesn’t find anybody with the competence to do it for him, except he goes to import somebody from overseas. After a time, he says to himself, I’m not bothering. So apart from the investment we are planning to make on our own either alone or in joint venture, we are establishing a project management organisation so that if these foreign investors come, we can say to them, what do you want? What help do you want? Is it study you want? Is it the statistics you want? Do you want us to help you in the construction of what you want and give you all the facilities? And we are speaking the same language with them. You are more likely to get them to say okay, let’s take this one. But at the moment, there is a lot of loss. The percentage of people who come in to say they want to invest actually is small, because they come and see all these in an unfamiliar situation. They go away. So we are now working with NIPC to come together to provide a kind of on-the-spot assistance to these people. That’s another thing we are doing apart from our own investment but you know our own resources are also limited so we cannot do everything.

Project cost
The total project cost of what we are looking at, is about just a little less than $1 billion. That does not mean that we will all contribute that ourselves. No! We are in a number of projects some of them $100m. Other bigger ones, we have to obviously attract other people to come to co-invest with us. That is the portfolio but you know, when you are dealing with large projects, sometimes, before you see anything on ground, it may take three years because there is a lot to put together. One problem we have for example in this country is to get the statistics, the data with which to work with. We have a pipe mill we are planning in the oil and gas. For the last two years, we’ve not been able to get any information about the consumption of pipes in the oil sector. We have not been able to do that. So, if you ask me why it has taken us long, that is part of it.

Frustrations
They are too many of them, but I don’t want to appear to be critical because the public service represents all of us in the population. If I want to see the head of a government department or a minister, it is not that the minister in point is unapproachable but those surrounding him will so make it impossible because, for one reason or the other, that’s our culture. If I want to see the managing director of a bank, which is in the private sector, you get there and it is exactly the same thing. So, it’s frustrating. Bureaucracy is not just government alone. It is also in the private sector. So let’s not keep saying it’s government, government. It’s the whole population. So, after a time, the average foreigner will say to himself what the hell am I doing here? Again, lack of data; lack of statistics and so on. It’s all part of it. At the end of the day, you say it’s not worth it because there are so many more attractive places to do business in the world. The world is an open place. It is a big place and people of this country don’t understand this. When you live here, you feel the world revolves around Nigeria. Nigeria is nothing. So for those of us who operate on the world, it’s nothing. I’m interested in Nigeria because I’m a Nigerian. Ordinarily, I don’t see why I should be interested in Nigeria. Until we see that we are in an inferior position or in a competitive position, we are low down, that’s when people here should wake up and be pro-active. There are many people I see in this country. They feel that foreigners are thronging here; foreigners are so desperate to come here. There is this attitude all along and unfortunately, this causes the very obstacle that makes it difficult to invest here.[b][/b]
More investment hinged on successful democratisation?
Let’s not be carried away with this issue of democratisation. I’m only looking at democratisation from the point of view that personal freedoms are not tampered with. Afterall, today, China is not what you call democracy because the West is selling this democracy as a recipe for economic development. That’s wrong. Let’s be clear. Democracy is being sold by the West as a` political thing and they make it more attractive; they make you feel that if you have democracy, you have economic development. It’s a lie because China is everything but democracy. Let’s draw a line between the two. On the other hand, I’m not necessarily saying that I’m happy. In China, the next day, you don’t know where you will be locked up. Okay? It’s a question of where you find the balance, because at the end of the day, you don’t eat democracy. You don’t eat freedom. If you sit down free, you can’t get water to drink.
So, it comes back to the point I’m making that people have to rise up, take their own destiny into their hand. Now, the foreigners going to China; all the foreign investments; is it because China is democratic? No, it’s not! They are going to China because of the economic opportunities there even though it’s not democratic. So let’s not necessarily say that if this place is not democratic, we’ll not invest. You can see that the whole thing is more numbled up than all that.

The economist and the engineer, who’s more active in you?
As I’m getting older, I’m leaning more towards economics because I have my people who are doing the technical and the engineering. We have a powerful organisation that does it. My job is to try and inspire; to try and put ideas across to see how they do it and also get cross flow from them because presently as I move on. I find that this issue of economic development; economic growth is a serious topic. If it’s done properly; if we get the right concept of it, that’s when this issue of technology will become recognised and given the central stage, so that’s why I’m dealing more now in that direction. But I couldn’t have done it without the experience of the years in running a big organisation like that from nothing.

Relaxation
Well, I do. If you don’t, then, you are not living. There are times I sit and my wife says to me, you are lazy because when I rest, I do rest and if I go to bed about 11 o clock in the night, sometimes, by 8 o clock, if you touch me, I will kick you because I’m still sleeping. I do have eight or nine hours or more of sleep. I play tennis (lawn). In fact, when I come to this country, I play tennis every two days and I’m playing not with the older people but with the young -those sharp guys so that, when I finish, I’m really exhausted but it’s good mentally and physically. Right now, I can run a 100 yards and come back with no feeling about it.

Family life
I am married to a white American. We have been married for 41 years and my son is presently in London, although his business is in the US. So he is in the US but temporary in London. He is in finance and record label company as well. My daughter is an assistant professor in Harvard School of Medicine.
She’s in Boston and I have two grandchildren. My youngest is 32, had a company but just decided to go and do an MBA.

Parting word to Nigerians
[b]Nigerians need to work harder, Nigerians need to blame government less and know that the onus is on them to work hard to develop this country. We are very much behind. This country is one of the poorest 10 countries. Nigerians have to realise this and we are laying a very, very bleak future for our children, unless we do something about it[/b]

I know this office in Harlow Essex. Never new it's owned by Nigeria man.