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“Everything can be made in Aba,” says Uche Jumbo, a Nollywood actress, on a billboard along the Aba-Owerri road in Aba. Wearing a headgear and beaming with a bold smile, Jumbo announces she is proudly “Nwa Aba” — a child of this commercial city in Abia State, southeastern Nigeria. And she proudly supports products manufactured in the town she grew up in.
There are other billboards along this road with pictures of celebrities expressing confidence in Aba products. The campaign, “Proudly Made in Aba”, is partly to change a negative tag, “Aba Made”, with which Nigerians derided goods manufactured in the town. Ironically, those who reject the Aba products sometimes buy the same products at higher prices when foreign labels are attached.
Remaining undaunted over the decades, the Aba manufacturers have succeeded in making the town a popular international destination for finished leather and garment products.The volume of trade between Aba and the rest of West and Central Africa is high, as tens of truckloads of manufactured goods depart the commercial city to the ports for onward export to Cameroun, Ghana, Togo, Equatorial Guinea, Central Africa Republic and other African countries.
“There is no documentation,” says a senior staff in the Nigerian Export Promotion Council, Aba Smart Office, who wishes to remain anonymous because he is not authorised to speak to the press. “There are no records of trade for us to know the exact volume of trade between Aba and these countries, but we are working with the associations to urge them to keep records of their individual sales.”
Manufacturing in Aba is informal, likewise the sale. The manufacturers are mostly in their houses, on the streets and market stalls. There are tens of thousands of individuals who are actively manufacturing different types of products but nobody knows for certain the quantity of these goods that are produced in the city.
The evidence of manufacturing in Aba cannot be ascertained by the number of factories because there are too few of them.The evidence is, however, ascertained by the number of trucks that transport manufactured goods out of the town and the presence of Aba products in all the markets in Nigeria and many African countries.
In Aba, the markets, the roadsides, the streets, and the backyards have been turned to manufacturing sites for different products where quality is maintained by fierce competition for sale.
“Aba is textile and leather,” Okechukwu Isiguzo, the Public Relations Officer of Aba Chamber of Commerce, Mines and Agriculture, told the ICIR.
He classifies the industries in Aba into four: micro, small, medium and large. He, however, points out that it is the micro industry that makes Aba unique in the manufacturing of goods.
“It is this micro industry that employs the people and pushes out the goods,” Isiguzo says. “Most of the products you see in the markets are produced by the micro industrialists inside their houses. You will see three tailors come together in one room but day and night, they are producing quality goods and putting labels that you won’t believe are coming out from there.”
Aba has a niche as a manufacturing hub for shoes, belts, bags and clothes but for those who understand the people’s creativity and entrepreneurship, manufacturing in the town goes beyond leather and garment products.
***Part of a post published in icirnigeria.org, website of the International Centre for Investigative Reporting (ICIR)
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