Abstract
This research work is a field survey research design, which was conducted to find out the Problems Facing State-Owned Enterprises in Enugu State “A case study of Presidential Hotels, Enugu and Nike Lake Hotels (Protea Hotel) Enugu”. The objectives of which to ascertain the role of advertising in creating mass awareness for the enterprises and to know whether the timing of these enterprises is well notified in our government enterprises, to ascertain the factors underscoring the current problems of state-owned Enterprises. And at the other hand, to facilitate this study, the researchers selected all the staff of Presidential Hotels and Protea Hotels (Nike Lake) in Enugu State rounding to 219 in number. The researchers used questionnaire in collection of data from the respondents. These were arranged as whether yes, no, no idea, good, fair, bad, poor, very poor or even very good. After the investigations, some findings were made, there are observed that promoting and creating of mass awareness should be the responsibility of government agents, getting the services needed at the right time is a poor managerial ability and non-payment of staff salaries affects the staff appreciation of their job and the most effective of all the findings was government interference, which many of the respondents said yes to and which causes the major problem of state-owned enterprises. We therefore recommend that government should look into the problems of state-owned enterprises and look out solutions to the possible problems.
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background of the Study
The history of state-owned enterprises or state involvement in business enterprises dates back to the period of British administration in Nigeria.
Ibie (1970:27) revealed this information and according to him, he grouped the enterprises into four and declared that the history did not come by choice rather by patrimony. During this period and according to customs, the British administrations were kept in charge of the colonial public sectors. This group includes the utility service industries, education, water, health, electricity etc during the wake of political independence, these state-owned services were retained automatically by the indigenous public sector. The second groups were the foreign private sector who were previously in charge of the three chain factors of production – management, capital and entrepreneurship. This was a situation where the distributive trades were largely in the hands of the foreign private sector.
After independence, it was felt that to allow the expatriate community to be in charge of the means of production and distribution would conquer or subdue the sovereignty of the country to neo-colonialism. But despite the anomaly created by this group, things were redressed by the indigenization measures of the seventies and this went a long way in enlarging the participatory and regulatory roles of the public sector.
According to Ibie, the third group was borne out of the post independence desire, which was buttressed by the in surge of the oil wealth of the public sector in order to enhance the progression of economic development by playing a catalystic role in strategic sectors where the indigenous private sectors was still feeble to take initiative . This was the justification for the public sector to make significant impact into iron and steel development, petroleum etc.
The fourth and final group of these business group was that of thorny spinners, which was regarded by public officers as not being creative in private sectors. It was felt that a thrust into this business would be expanding the revenue generating base of the public sector with the hope of operating and managing them as efficiently and as profitably as the private sectors were doing. The belief gave rise to the public sector ventures in such organizations like Hotels.