Kenya is renowned for its runners, but Kenyan runners don’t run in Kenyan shoes. That could be about to change. Enda is a start-up company which has just raised $128,000 through crowd-funding to start producing a running shoe in Kenya.
How about Crowd-funding to produce umbrellas locally. We waste forex annually importing umbrellas from China. We can create jobs and save reduce import.
Can we replicate the Enda move in Nigeria?
Or; preferably a Made-in-Nigeria Kazbrella?
Wow! 
Krabrella na die! I’m inspired.
Urm… why umbrellas if I may ask? I don’t think we Nigerians are known for walking in the rain or enjoying the sun (If I’m to go by the Kenyan analogy).
Basically the key to any country’s development is to build local capicity by locally manufacturing what it needs and not importing them.
Presently Nigeria imports a lot of things in addition to umbrellas- Rice, Refined Oil, Pharmaceuticals, Electronics, Cars, Clothes, Shoes, Toothpicks 
, toothbrushes, fruits 
etc.
It would have made more sense if you were suggesting ways to locally refine oil in small scale or helping the government turn those illegal refineries in the Niger Delta to legal and efficient ones. God help Nigeria.
we can start somewhere
While I’m not holding brief for our chronic import addiction dependence, no country has 0% import (not even North Korea).
There are some things that cannot be produced here (e.g. apples & real oranges - the type with the orange skin), or would not make economic sense to produce.
All Nigeria has been doing for years is talk about starting “somewhere”. Where is that “somewhere”, and when are we going to start?
I’m very much aware that no country has 0% import. Japan and Singapore for example have ZERO natural resources and have to rely heavily on importation of raw materials.
When I was speaking of not importing goods into the country, I was referring to those things we could manufacture here sufficiently and also to the idea of exporting more than we import.(i.e being a NET EXPORT country)
That is a serious long shot.
Most items on your list do not qualify, that’s the main point I’m addressing.
I beg to differ. I thank God for the likes of Dangote who are very vissionary. While some scoffed at the idea of being a net exporter of cement, Dangote went on to build a factory that could produce way more than Nigeria needed.
In one of his recent interviews he also stated that the refinery he is building has a much larger capacity than what Nigeria needs daily.
We can produce a LOT sufficiently. All it takes is raw guts.
Strawman detected…
There were cement manufacturers in this country before Dangote.
Converting limestone to cement is not as difficult as making a vehicle out of iron ore (which is not the only component needed, mind you).
Look at the industries he operates in, the rudimentary requirements are all in place.
Also, not to dull his shine, but the government plays a leading role in the movie of his business success.
All these are challenges that have to be addressed one after the other. It is not enough to say that Nigeria can’t be sufficient at some things.
Today we enjoy dot com businesses in Nigeria. For us to have gotten here, GSM had to come in first, then the internet had to go from data to gprs to 4G etc (while simultaneously being affordable). For someone in 2001, if you had said that we would have our own equivalent of amazon, ebay, craiglist etc. It would have been difficult to believe.
Nigerian ingenuity was not the cause, but the fact that service providers had to keep up with international standards.
Affordable is a tricky term. Internet service in Nigeria are expensive relative to what’s obtainable in the countries we copy get inspiration from.
It never was or is difficult to believe that Nigerians can copy/clone stuff.
Which is depressing because Nigerians are smart & resilient by default. Why do we sell ourselves short? Beats me.
Truth is, we can keep going back and forth on this issue. What I will say is this- You believe what you believe and I will believe what I want to believe but in the end, the optimists will always find a way.
Sticking one’s head in the sand like the proverbial ostrich is not optimism, and acknowledging that there are challenges is not pessimism.
Actually that’s not really true according to this article though it’s 3 years old
From the article you posted:
The ITU measured the monthly prices as a percentage of monthly gross national income, so the cause of the massive disparity comes down to the market itself.
The explanation explains itself. 
They pegged Nigeria at $22.7, by the way.
To be sincere with you, the Enda shoes thing will sell because it is not just running kit, it is fashionable, but Umbrella…seriously?
Your strategy must be superb o…umbrella is not really a necessity here in Nigeria, I don’t even like it as a person, it is more of an extra load that I might just forget somewhere. So for me to buy your umbrella, it must just be exceptional and I must find a real need to go out with it n probably NOT forget it.