The National Automotive Design and Development Council (NADDC) has unveiled plans to begin local production of 10 essential vehicle spare parts, a move aimed at reducing Nigeria’s heavy reliance on imports. Currently, the country spends a staggering $1 billion annually on spare parts imports, a financial burden the NADDC intends to alleviate through this new initiative.

Joseph Osanipin, Director General of NADDC, shared these details during the closing ceremony of a two-week automotive engineering and software design training program held in Abuja. The training, organized in collaboration with Midas IT Co. of South Korea, focused on Midas NFX software, a cutting-edge platform for advanced design and analysis in the automotive sector.

Represented by Fidelis Achiv, Director of the Directorate of Research, Design, and Development at NADDC, Osanipin revealed that the council is set to begin local production of spare parts for Nigeria’s 11 million vehicles. This initiative is part of a broader strategy to enhance local vehicle assembly, with the aim of increasing the country’s current vehicle assembly capacity from under 1% to 40%.

According to him, “Vehicles that have been assembled come in completely built, and they just remove the tyres, remove the exhaust system, remove the engine, ship them, and come and assemble them here. But we want to transform from that to a level where these vehicles come in unpainted, the welding is done here, some components parts are produced here, and the assembly will add more value and employ more people. We have over 11 million vehicles on our Nigerian roads.

“Of the over 3,000 parts in a vehicle, if we can leverage on producing just 10 that we can beat our chest, that in the whole world, Nigeria produces these 10 components and they are best, the market is going to be huge. Our economy will change,” he stated.

The training boot camp, which hosted 15 participants, was designed to equip engineers with the skills necessary to help realize the vision of transforming Nigeria’s automotive industry. Fidelis Achiv explained that the essence of this training is to empower engineers to design and produce vehicle parts locally, ultimately making Nigeria self-sufficient in vehicle parts production. This initiative is a key step toward reducing the country’s reliance on imports and building a robust domestic manufacturing sector.

The Managing Director of FAZSAL Nigeria Limited, Abdul-Lawal Zubair, urged the participants to apply the knowledge gained from the training to create innovative designs that could help propel Nigeria’s automotive industry forward. He emphasized the importance of harnessing creativity and technical skills to develop solutions that would not only improve local manufacturing capabilities but also enhance the competitiveness of the Nigerian automotive sector on a global scale.

Parts prices about to skyrocket beyond imagination