At a two-day conference in Lagos, the Turnaround Management Association (TMA) Nigeria convened experts and industry leaders to explore strategies for breathing life into the country’s long list of moribund assets.
The conference, themed “Reviving Moribund Assets: The Role of Turnaround Management in Nigeria’s Economic Recovery Strategy,” was held in collaboration with Konrad Adenauer Stiftung Nigeria. It featured wide-ranging discussions on why successive governments have failed to sustain turnaround initiatives across sectors.
One of the keynote speakers, Professor Adetunji Ogunyemi, a professor of economic history at Obafemi Awolowo University, traced Nigeria’s industrialisation journey from the 1960s to the 1980s. He argued that the country’s chronic failures with industrial projects, particularly refinery rehabilitation, stem not from technical shortcomings but from deep-seated political inertia.
“Turnaround maintenance in Nigeria has always been entangled with politics,” he said. “Many political leaders simply lack the will to do what is right. And without political will, nothing meaningful can happen.”
According to him, political interference often overrides sound economic judgment. “Imagine a situation where the main financier of a president or governor is the same person sabotaging the success of a public enterprise,” he added. “For such a leader to confront his own backer requires extraordinary courage. When that courage is missing, everything fails.”
He recalled a moment when a Nigerian president ordered an investigation into whether the country’s refineries should be rehabilitated or scrapped. The report concluded that they were too old and too small to remain viable. The Port Harcourt refinery, Nigeria’s first, built between 1958 and 1965, had a capacity of only 60,000 barrels per day, insufficient by today’s standards.
Yet, in a politically motivated reversal, another president refunded buyers who had purchased the refineries, citing fears of job losses. “Economics follows politics in Nigeria,” Ogunyemi remarked, “and not the other way around.”
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Beyond the failures of national infrastructure, discussions also centred on the structural challenges crippling enterprise growth in Nigeria.
Akinyele Aluko, an MSME consultant and former director at the Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry, highlighted three fundamental barriers: manpower deficiencies, strategic weaknesses, and funding constraints.
“Nigeria’s education-to-employment pipeline remains broken,” Aluko said. “Of the 600,000 graduates produced annually, nearly half are unemployed or underemployed. Only about 12 percent possess the technical skills industries actually demand.”
He added that this mismatch between academic training and industrial needs continues to hamper productivity, innovation, and the competitiveness of Nigerian enterprises.
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As the conference concluded, speakers emphasised that Nigeria’s economic revival hinges on more than policy pronouncements; it requires a cultural shift toward accountability, merit, and long-term planning. Reviving moribund assets, they argued, will demand not just engineering expertise or financial investment, but above all, the political will to make hard choices for the greater good.