INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITIES IN THE RURAL AREAS THROUGH COOPERATIVE AND AGRICULTURAL ENTERPRISES
CHAPTER ONE
1.0 INTRODUCTION
1.1 GENERAL OVERVIEW OF THE STUDY
Co-operative societies in Nigeria, functioning as small scale business, have usually confined themselves to providing production and consumer goods, credit and service to their individuals members. In primary societies, membership averages between 20 and 40. It is rear to fins a cooperative in the country with a membership of more than 100, except in the urban an institution saving and credit cooperatives. The provision of these goods and services has often been restricted manily to the agricultural sector. These goods and services include the provision of production inputs (mostly credit) and marketing, especially the traditional exports in the 1940s and 50s to set up some industries (see Onuoha 1973: 14-23 and 30-31, Adeyiye 1928: 90-91) these efforts have not been sustained, in recent years therefore cooperatives have generally not made their impact felt in the industrial sector. Even in the agricultural sector, they have not been quite effective (see Chukwu 1993:123) because among others they have not really identified potentials areas of investment, nor do they appear to know that they can undertake investment which facilitate the business operations of their members without the cooperatives themselves going into the direct production of the final consumer products has cast aspersions on their veracity as veritable instruments for sustainable socio-economic development on the country for the concept of sustainable development see for example (Eboh 1995)
1.2 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
The investment opportunities in the rural area through cooperative and agricultural enterprises has been and is still faced with many constraints and problems that hindered the pace of the anticipated rapid growth. This includes inadequate basic infrastructure facilities, weak raw material base, utilization and unavailability of production and obsolence, shortage of managerial manpower, strong competition from imports, institution administrative bottlenecks, competition of external resources, interactable plight of the national electric power authority (NEPA) now power holding Nigeria plc to supply power which remained a cog in the wheel of industrial progress, burden of cost and poor sales of production input, and the output income dumping and inconsistency in government policy
