This is certainly a tremendous blow and reasons are multiple and diverse. I won’t go into them all to protect the guilty.

It hurts personally because the genesis of this plant was a huge lesson for me on the positive power and influence a person can have if they believe. It started with a simple search for diapers I wanted to gift to my cousin and her newborn son back in January 2006. At the time I traveled like crazy on business designing Pampers for low income countries and qualifying Pampers plants. I lost count of trips to countries like Venezuela, Chile, Argentina, India, and China. I never had problems finding Pampers in stores in these countries but yet in my own country for my own family the search took me to multiple stores, only not quitting because of stubbornness. Later I discovered this was because we only had 1 single diaper manufacturing line in Ibadan and an old 500 pads/min line at that!

Of course when I got back to Cincinnati I setup meetings with everyone and told the story of driving from store to store and store owners complaining the supply wasn’t enough. I convinced the VPs to add another line and double the capacity, but a year later my contacts in Ibadan (Oyo State) said they were still running like crazy with demand so high they were not shutting down for maintenance so of course my campaign started again and this time the VPs jumped on the corporate jet and went to go see for themselves.

Nigeria’s expanding economy was a big help and the plan was eventually to build a new plant in Agbara (Ogun State).

It opened in 2012, the date in the article (by PREMIUM TIMES) is wrong, #fakenews to sensationalize; VP (Yemi Osinbajo) was there a year ago but not to commission a new plant

We brought 3 of the very best diaper lines we have globally. Today it takes only a minute to find Pampers at the market. We also brought in new FemCare lines and the plant continued to grow. These Pampers lines are so incredible that NASA partners we have are in awe of the technology. I’ve been to a lot of plants in my career and Agbara easily competed with the best across every metric. As a nation we lost something great. Agbara was our proof that we could compete on any technology.

The government’s promises of power and natural gas to Agbara were of course not kept and this created massive problems for us. The type of technology we have in Agbara simply cannot be run on generators! All the foreign firms we brought in to help figure out power supply insisted they could do the job but when they saw conditions on the ground they gave up. Finally it was our own team of technicians that took on the challenge and designed and built the power system for the plant. P&G Agbara is probably the only place in the country that has not had even 1 second of power interruption in the last 6 years – not once! That power team was 100% Nigerian employees – this is one of the reasons I get so frustrated when we fail to realize the brilliance of our people.

The logistics system we built was also global benchmark. From the control room in Agbara we tracked every truck no matter where it was in the country to ensure product got where it was supposed to be on schedule. That in a country where over 95% of trucks probably shouldn’t be on the road and calling those things roads is generous in the first place.

The $300 million price tag was high but quite reasonable when considering what that team was able to accomplish. In fact it was low when considering the upside potential. But when the venture fails people will jump to criticize. Did we try to jump to high? Why reach for the stars? Why not have settled for average or good enough?

The competition from Huggies and Molfix was a problem but beating down competition is something P&G is very good at. On the diapers business I’ve been involved in doing it in so many countries. I just completed a great assignment doing it in Hair Care across India and Middle East. Competition was tough but not the problem.

P&G has lessons to learn from this but Nigeria lost far more and therefore has so much more to learn. For P&G the Nigerian financial troubles came at the worst possible moment. Globally the company is hurting in perhaps its worst crisis ever. We have reduced staffing globally by 25% since 2013/2014 much of that at home in Cincinnati. In fact the decision to move to Nigeria in 2015 was smart because it was still a bright spot for the company. Big markets that typically provide buffer were and continue to themselves need help. An activist investor recently got onto the board after a multi-million dollar campaign to keep him off.

Nevertheless the extreme mismanagement of our country is the single biggest reason for this shutdown. It’s the reason we still have expats who don’t understand the local consumer and market dynamics running so many of our businesses. It’s the reason we can’t import raw materials. It’s the reason we can’t locally source raw materials. It’s the reason we turn to crypto-currency to conduct business. It’s the reason we can’t trust that power will be available and even natural gas of which we are a major global supplier cannot be reliably piped to our own manufacturing hub. It’s the reason I created an R&D plan at an exchange rate of 1:155 which became impossible just 1 year later when the rate had jumped to 1:400+.

We can suggest that the problem was the high tech manufacturing lines, the incredible power station, the awesome warehouse, the fabulous logistics system, etc, etc. To suggest this is so incredibly wrong that I won’t even begin to get into it. When P&G does business in a place it raises the level quality, the level of standards, they level of employee skill.

P&G will never lower its standards so it can compete in a country. We reach for the stars – we don’t do average, we are superior. This principle is why P&G beat all my other job offers when I left university. Instead of expecting companies to lower standards Nigeria must figure out how to create a reasonable business environment. Until then our people will continue to not have jobs, when they get jobs, they will continue to work for low wages that they will used to buy poor quality goods and services.

We will be back. Just need to go figure out a new strategy…

 

Editor’s Note: This article was written by an anonymous staff, a Nigerian presently working at the Cincinnati, United States Global Headquarters of the Procter & Gamble, P&G