RMRDC to create 26 million jobs

The Raw Materials Research and Development Agency on Tuesday said it planned to help create 26 million jobs in the country over a 10-year period.The Director-General, RMRDC, Prof. Peter Onwualu, said this when members of the House of Representatives Committee on Science and Technology paid an oversight visit to the agency in Abuja.According to him, the plan involves the establishment of clusters of 15,000 small scale processing industries across the country.Clusters are concentration of industries in a particular location or dispersed locations but joined by a network and carrying out similar operational activities, therefore, facing common opportunities and challenges such as using the same or similar raw materials, technologies, expertise and markets.The RMRDC boss explained that the industrial cluster concept was aimed at assisting micro, small and medium scale industries to grow and overcome the difficulties associated with manufacturing.According to him, the agency in a blueprint on the cluster programme enlists the triple Helix concept in actualising its objectives. Onwualu said RMRDC would stimulate the emergence of the clusters in three phases and had plans to assist in the processing of one key raw material per geopolitical zone and the Federal Capital Territory that would result in the emergence of seven clusters, with each attracting at least 20 small scale processing industries before 2013.If successfully executed, he said the programme would create about 26 million jobs, but lamented that over 80 per cent of the raw materials being used by factories in Nigeria were imported.
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