Emeka Offor Plaza: Home of thriving start-ups
It was a rowdy day at Main Market Onitsha on February 27. This was Monday, the busiest day of the week. Traders beckoned on potential buyers. The noise from haggling buyers and persuading sellers was loud enough to deafen the eavesdropper.
At the centre of the market sat Sir Emeka Offor Plaza, where phones, accessories and electronic gadgets were marketed, repaired and assembled.
It was easy to locate the plaza from New Market Road, which stretched to Awka Road and Nkpor in Onitsha. Emeka Offor’s location was strategic being located close to FirstBank, UBA, Access Bank and a string of other financial institutions.
Emeka Offor Plaza has a reputation for providing solutions for all electronic problems. Some of the shops are small and some others, medium.
There are 272 shops, with some specialising in phone sales and many others living off phone assembly and repairs.
It is easy to see big names such as Transtell, Uche Link, Emma Nnewi, and Onyii Communications, among others.
Some of the players go home with N100,000 to N5 million from gross sales, traders said.
There are other plazas around Emeka Offor, but the salesman’s mantra is: If it’s not my product, it can never be like mine.
Like the writer, many residents of Anambra State refer the plaza simply as Emeka Offor.
For starters, Emeka Offor is the owner of the plaza. A politician and oil mogul, Emeka Offor was vocal in Anambra State politics between 1999 and 2013.
The plaza is a household name in Anambra State. Phones are at least 20 to 30 percent cheaper than street prices and there are technicians that understand the workings of electronics like their original manufacturers.
Due to the popularity of the plaza and high number of consumers visiting it daily, some traders that deal in clothes and travels have acquired shops there.
“Ninety percent of businesses we do here are communication based,” Ifeoma Nsofor, lawyer, who oversees the plaza, told Start-Up Digest.
“We have those who deal in phones; we have others dealing in accessories such as chargers, batteries, phone parts, ear phones, USB cord and others,” Nsofor explained.
“There are also others who deal in fashion, though they are in the minority. We also have one or two people who are travel agents,” she said.
According to her, some entrepreneurs in the plaza had more than one shop, with a few having between four and eight.
Though there are 272 shops at the plaza, each shop has a number of young people who have expertise in technology to solve technical electronic problems. Each of them can collect up to N5,000 or more depending on what the problems are.
“This place has employed a lot of people and given them hope. I remember people who came here with nothing that are doing really well today,” she stated.
“So this place can best be seen as the home of small and medium businesses. As long as you are here and be of good behaviour, nobody will disturb you,” she explained.
However, there are still some young men at the plaza who do not have shops but eke out a living by taking potential customers around.
“What do you want? This is my shop,” one of such people told this writer.
On asking questions, this writer understood that he neither had any shop nor any stake in the plaza.
But on looking around, it was clear that this was not strange to the management of the plaza.
“Don’t let anybody follow you around. These boys may look gentle but they are inhuman, dangerous, criminal and deadlier than cobra,” was clearly pasted on the walls within the plaza.
The writer took it up with Ifeoma Nsofor.
“This is one of the biggest challenges we have,” she said.
“The plaza has gone beyond its capacity. So there is a tendency for unscrupulous people to hang around, trying to eke out a living from falsehood. We have had to put a kind of caveat ‘Buyer beware’. So, coming into the plaza, someone will tell you, ‘I sell phones’ and by the time you buy from him and use such phones, you find out they are malfunctioned. But by the time you come back, the person has disappeared,” she further explained.
“There was a time we were using soldiers and the police to scare them away. Some of them refused to go to school. They come here and go away every day with N20, 000 or even N50, 000,” she said.
“Is there no way you can positively engage these boys?” asked the writer.
Responding, Nsofor said she had engaged 15 of them.
“We tell them, learn to flash phones and we will provide places you can stay. But for you to hang around here, I will get you arrested,” she stated.
Another big challenge facing Emeka Offor is that other plazas around it also claim they are part of it, with a view to wooing consumers who do not know the boundaries.
“Every plaza here is Emeka Offor. That’s why we have boldly written it out there, so that if you are going to Sir Emeka Offor Plaza, you will know your boundary, “she said.
Nsofor explained that weak naira resulting from oil price lows had jerked up phone prices sometimes by over 100 percent.
“There are phones they used to sell for N15,000 that now goes for N30,000 to N35,000,” she said, adding that she occasionally had touts and government agencies coming to ask for all form of fees, taxes and charges.
”Any tax you want to collect, I will simply ask you to give me the legal document backing it. I do not assist anybody to collect taxes. There was a time they brought the GSM Operators’ Tax here and I asked them, ‘How can someone who sells phones be a GSM operator? They left and never returned,” she stated.
ODINAKA ANUDU