First African indigenous car manufacturer and Nigeria’s popular scientist and inventor, Engr. Ezekiel Izuogu, has passed on.
Family sources reveal that the African foremost car manufacturer who hails from Ideato North LGA of Imo State died recently.
The brilliant Igbo Electrical Engineer and lecturer at the Federal Polytechnic, Nekede designed and developed the Izuogu Z-600, the first African indigenous manufactured car in 1997.
BBC described the car as “the African dream machine” due to the fact that 90 percent of its parts were sourced locally.
The car was projected to sell at $2000 and going by that projection, the car would have taken the global automobile market by storm and became the cheapest car on earth. With mass production planned to commence under Izogu Motors plant in Naze, Owerri, the prospects of an industrial revolution in Igbo land and Nigeria, was in the pipeline.
The car was fortified with a locally made 1.8L four-cylinder engine that had 18mpg and offered the car ability to achieve a top speed of 140 km/h. Izuogu preferred Front-Wheel Drive (FWD) to Rear Wheel Drive (RWD) because the transmission tunnel which Rear Wheel Drive required would be more expensive to fabricate.
About 90 percent of the car’s components were manufactured locally. Late General Sani Abacha constituted a 12-man panel of inquiry comprising professionals to ascertain the car’s roadworthiness and authenticity and after several days of probing, the committee certified the car as road worthy and authentic and recommended that some of the bumps on the body of the car be worked on. This was five years before India built their first car known as the Indi.
During a well planned unveiling ceremony that had General Sani Abacha represented by Oladipo Diya, more than 20 foreign ambassadors and thousands of people in attendance, the Federal Government pledged a grant of N235 million to Dr. Izuogu.
Dr. Izuogu waited for that grant till he died. Nothing was released to him. In 2006, the government of South Africa summoned Dr. Izuogu to stage a presentation about the car in the presence of many world-class engineers. The attendees were impressed with his presentation and they invited him to come and set up a plant in South Africa and commence production of the car. Dr. Izuogu agreed reluctantly as he was not happy about the fact that the locals of Naze and Nigerians would lose on employment generation.
On March 11, 2006 at about 2.00 a.m, about 12 heavily armed men broke into Dr. Izogu’s factory in Naze and stole various machines and tools which include the design history notebook of Z-600, the design file of Z-MASS containing the design history for mass production of Z-600 car and the moulds for various parts of the car.
While talking about robbery, Dr. Izuogu said: “It seems that the target of this robbery is to stop the efforts we are making to mass-produce the first-ever locally made car in Africa. Other items stolen included locally produced timing wheel, locally produced camshaft, locally produced crankshaft, locally produced engine tappets, all 20 pieces each.’’
Also stolen were ‘’ten pieces of locally produced Z-600 engine blocks, ten pieces of locally produced pistons, four pieces of engine block mounds, four pieces of top engine block moulds, ten pieces of engine flywheel and two pieces each of rear car and front mudguard moulds.”
Dr. Izuogu lamented that he did not only lose over one N1 billion in monetary terms but also lost time of around 10 years and the energy it took to design and manufacture the moulds. He said: “To worsen the matter, our design notebook was also stolen.”
The incident was regarded by him as a national economic disaster because the country had lost a technological and intellectual property.
The Press was silent about this story. The setback created by the robbery and the attitude displayed by the government frustrated Izuogu and the dream died.
