Alh. Danjuma Ibrahim is a farmer, who has been in the practice for several years. Ibrahim, who hails from Sokoto State, shared his experiences on Trust TV’s 30 Minutes programme with Mannir Dan Ali.
You must be one of the lucky people in Sokoto, because as I understand, there are a number of local governments like Isa, Sabon Binin, Zurmi, and possibly others, where farming is under threat, almost impossible because people are actually been picked from their homes. If they go to the farms, they get kidnapped and in some instances they have to pay some money for the bandits to allow them to farm. Do you come from a place, where it is safe enough to actually farm?
We are just being brave, so to say. We cannot abandon farming because of how important it is, that is one. Two, there are fewer cases now of kidnap in our area and there is fortified security around there too because we are along the highway, where there are a lot of checkpoints of the police and the military are there also. We had to spend so much on securing the place. I think, to secure the farm, I had to deploy three excavators and some earth moving equipment to dig a trench round the whole farm; over 230 hectares.
So you had to literally spend money to turn it into some kind of fortification…
That is the first thing. In fact, the money is near the cost, more than the cost of a round of production of a year. We have to do that to feel safe enough to be inside, because even if the security agencies are around, if you are ambushed, there’s nothing you can do. So, we dug a trench round the farm so that whenever there’s any incursion we get some notice.
Yeah, because of the barrier that is there in between, it is not easy to be on a motorcycle…
Thank you very much. You can’t even use motorcycle to fly it, so you have to come through the gate and that is what we did before we even started farming.
But not many farmers can do that, because in any case, many have very small holding…
You see I’ve always been saying this, there’s no amount of farming that will be done in Nigeria, if it is not commercial-based that will satisfy our population, it’s not possible. Subsistence farming can never ever carry us.
But it’s been carrying us all these years, because largely, there are few commercial farmers like you, the ones, who are doing in hundreds of hectares, thousands of hectares. These peasant farmers who do the subsistence farming, the extra they have, they sell, which is what ends up feeding those of us who may not be farming…
All through the years people thought that was what was feeding us, but it’s not true. We import, Nigeria imports a lot of grains. It was stopped when I think, President Muhammadu Buhari came to power and gave so much emphasis to farming. Anchor Borrower was introduced and it was a very laudable programme.
But it had big issues…
The issues you see, anything without planning will never come to fruition, it will never succeed. You have to do a critical study on issues, what will make it happen, feasibility studies and the rest of them before you go into practice.
The Anchor Borrower was haphazardly brought in not knowing the underlying problems that are associated with farming in Nigeria. You see, some people might be offended, but this is just the true situation and we have to say it as it is. Agriculture, whether we like it or not, has to be the first priority of any government.
You mean ahead of health, education?
Ahead of everything.
People will contest that…
Without food what will health be, without food what will the security agencies be, without food, what will we be doing here, will I be here with you without eating?
Food is the first before anything, that’s why when you go to the hospital, the first thing you are told is eat before you take your drugs because nothing works in an empty stomach. The insurgency, we are talking about is lesser than hunger, because there’s no nuclear weapon that is as strong as hunger in the world.
So how does Nigeria deal with this challenge of food insecurity, how does Nigeria claw back to the position that it was in the 60s and 70s when even a lot of its GDP contribution was from agriculture?
That time, the cartel that exists now in agriculture was not there.
Cartel?
There’s a cartel now. I want to let you know that, that is what is happening. If you quantify the money that is put into agriculture by the state governments, the figure will shock you and what is the resultant output, near nothing.
But it also cost a lot of money to be able to do all the things that are needed, from the land clearing, mechanisation, the input, the harvesting, the storage, which are all very weak in Nigeria…
Thank you very much. Let me take you back to, during the military regime, there was this NALDA, Nigeria Agricultural Land Development Authority, that was created by, I think the Babangida regime…
I think even Buhari brought back something like that…
Okay, I am not sure, but under Anchor Borrower, yeah. There was the mechanisation aspect of it, but this one, I was talking, about machines, a whole parastatal was created that did land clearing and so much support services were done then.
This cartel I’m talking to you about wasn’t flourishing then because people were not into it. Now, there is a cartel on fertilizer, there is also a cartel on seed, which is the root of farming, because if you plant a bad seed, that’s the end of the story; you have murdered the whole farming you are going to do. Some people are there, they are not physical farmers, but they are feeding on agriculture.
But you know what you said about government doing things, the history is that government usually fails in this. It happened even elsewhere under the Soviets and all of that, they were just filling figures about production when the actual production was not there…
It’s not true. Even now, let me give you one simple example. This dry season farming that just ended before this rainy season, there was an ambitious plan to do so many hectares of wheat. I think the African Development Bank gave about $134million while JAICA also gave Nigeria money.
That is Japanese International Cooperation Agency…
It gave Nigeria $100million. I don’t know if the JAICA money was accessed, but I’m sure, African Development Bank gave about $100 million.
It must have been accessed because there were reports of officials of the bank visiting Jigawa, to check on the things that were grown there…
The thing was poorly handled. The figures you are talking about, cooked figures, are just coming out everywhere because whoever does not dismantle the cartel I’m talking about will have nothing, because I’m a victim.
You wanted to participate…
You see the next billionaires in the world, trillionaires in the world are going to be farmers because you have to eat and markets are there all over the world. Nigeria alone, whatever you produce, you don’t even need to take it anywhere because you have people, easy mouths are there to consume it.
Whoever comes in as a president and does not look at how to deal with the issue of transparency and getting the right people, dismantling the architecture that is there, will not get results. People scramble to get to offices in the Federal Ministry of Agriculture, just because they want to amass wealth. At the end of the day, those who are supposed to benefit from this thing, we and the teaming Nigerian population, don’t see anything, all they see is soaring prices.
But isn’t it the same story in other areas? Because the civil service is more or less dead, it is not delivering, there is no efficiency, no transparency. So probably, it is the same in other areas, it is not restricted to agriculture…
The most dangerous one is that of agriculture and people don’t seem to bother.
How do you dismantle it if what you say is correct?
The right thing to do in Nigeria is to declare State of Emergency on agriculture. No country in the world procures more machineries than the Nigerian government has been doing for the past 30 to 40 years.
Scrap sellers and second-hand dealers of agricultural equipment are flourishing everywhere. We buy machines day in day out. I see state governments scrambling and working on getting 1,000, 2,000 machines…
Just like the Niger State government is now doing in agriculture…
There is so much enthusiasm about it. But I want to tell you, with this situation on ground, it is something that is deep rooted. Let me tell you where it started…
The small holder farmer who is supposed to be the main engine room in our agriculture because as a commercial farmer I can do maybe, one thousand hectares, but that’s not enough to do everything for me.
I will have to get out-growers. Now, the small holder farmer, who is the engine room, has been taught to be an agent of theft.
How?
Every season that comes, fertilizer is said to be distributed, farm inputs are said to be distributed. A truck will come with the machines to be distributed and the farmers will assemble there. As they are collecting the inputs, a merchant is waiting with his truck. They now take the pumping machine, which costs maybe N55,000 or N60,000, they give it to the merchant, who gives them 20,000 cash.
Don’t they want to farm anymore?
How will they farm? They believe, you have come, for them to help you steal money. All of them, you see them as villagers, who don’t know anything. They listen to radio and they hear that maybe in Sokoto State, 5,000 or 10,000 pumping machines have been procured and local government is going to have so, so. All the distribution plan will be announced on television and they listen.
Are you saying that there is no transparency and the whole system down to the peasant farmer is designed to fail?
My fingers were burnt. I came in with so much enthusiasm. In 2020, 2021, I wasn’t one of the biggest producers of onion in the country, because our area, Sokoto State, is the largest producer of onion.
With this commercial sense I came in with a lot of inputs, went to Holland Netherlands, bought the seeds there, they have the best seeds, and I brought them into the country. There are companies that sell within the country here, we moped almost all the seeds they had.
We did everything, launched what we were going to do and all the farmers were happy not knowing that I was going to fall into the trap of the cartel that had been created already. We went in with enthusiasm, brought in a lot of small holder farmers, farmer communities…
Out growers?
Out growers. We agreed with them, gave them inputs, gave them everything. They sold back the seed we gave them, they sold the pumping machines we gave them, they were collecting money for labour from me while they did not plant anything. We had mappings and everything. We did so many things…
But at the end of the day, the peasant farmers defeated all the technology…
Defeated all the technology because the cartel, even those in the IT, are working with them. They are on the same page. So these small holder farmers are waiting for you with open arms to come with whatever you are coming with for them to steal.
But some say that it’s probably because you don’t go to the right farmers, you don’t follow the right protocol like getting maybe the village head, the ward heads who are based there, who know the real farmers…
These ones you are saying, they are the head of the cartel at the village level. I went to all the places I did my farming, I went to the district head first, I went to all of them, we sat down, agreed before we got the list of people that were supposed to farm.
You see, I had over 6,000 out growers that time in Sokoto.
How do you take 6,000 people to jail?
That is a big question… What resources do I have to prosecute them?
And you are not even government…
I’m not government. My fingers were burnt and I did it personally with my own money. That is, I had a lot of tractors. I think I had about 15 or so tractors and the rest of them. So, I did a lot of farming in different places of this same onion. That’s why I’m telling you that Anchor Borrower never failed, but it was destroyed by the cartel.
When we came to the time of harvest, what is your economy of production? It was between N14,000 and N15,000 to produce a bag of onion, but because no storage as you mentioned, no processing, we were forced to sell a bag of onion at N3,000.
So each bag you sold, you had a loss of 11,000.
Yes, we had a loss of N11,000 to N12,000 at the selling point.
That means you look for the exit…
We then went into local storage, which was the practice since our forefathers. We did the storage on a very big land. You know what happened to us? Bandits set the storage on fire.
In Sokoto, you must have learned, there was one time that bandits set ablaze a storage area of onion. We lost billions there, so I had to retreat and I then knew that the production was not even the problem of onion. The problem was storage and processing and that was when I went to Netherlands. I went to about four countries, which are advanced in storage and everything and processing of onion. That was where I was able to get the machines I brought, built the factory and installed them in Sokoto.
Where you would be doing the onion flakes?
Onion flakes powder. In fact, not only onion flakes powder, tomato, turmeric, garlic, all these perishables, all of them will be processed there and dried.
But doesn’t your own experience tell you that the peasant farmer is still the king, that commercial farmers like you can at best only succeed in the processing area, not in the actual production…
No. This is what moved me to what I’m doing now. I discovered that if I had to succeed, then I had to take the bull by the horn by getting my farm, and equipping the farm which is about 250 hectares of land.
And then planting the seeds…
Then land. Land clearing is very, very expensive, so we had to do that and now Alhamdulillah, we are planting about 70 hectares of millet. We are planting about 80 hectares of rice and we are doing about 40 hectares of soya beans and our local beans also, we are doing a large hectarage of it.
So I am doing it myself practically, because I don’t have belief in the small holder farmer anymore, unless there is serious reorientation and security measures are put in place.
Have you received any support from government?
Well, I’ve always known that if you wait for government, nothing will happen. Up till this time that I’m talking to you, I can say that this is one of the biggest commercial farming being done now in Nigeria, I’ve not seen any.
But there are people who are doing bigger hectares. I have been in some of them…
Alhamdulillah, they are doing very well, like in Keffi, you have Abdullahi Adamu, his farm is very big. Mine is not at that scale yet, but I want to tell you that for success to come, I want you to discuss with Abdullahi Adamu, the former governor of Nasarawa State and ask him of his challenges.
His fingers must have been burnt several times, but he has endured…
If your fingers are not burnt, you can’t get to where I am now, you cannot, because you will lose faith and run away.
But you’ve decided that you won’t run away.
I want to tell you one thing. You see, what we are doing this year, I intend to do this in about five states. I have a farm in Kaduna, I have a farm in Abuja also. I’m thinking of going to Niger too.
To ride on the back of the former governor…
Yes and I’m thinking of going to Nasarawa, because you see where you have about, six, seven months rainfall, what else do you need? We have the land, we have the rain from God, we have human resources. There’s nobody that can boost of these. But, we have polluted them, some people have succeeded in destroying the engine room of agriculture in Nigeria.
What do we do, how do we get out of the quagmire that you’ve painted?
These security summits and the rest of them they are doing, yes, they are fantastic, but the most serious summit to be done is Agricultural Summit.
But summit is just talk, you know it seems in Nigeria, talking about something is like actually doing it, while they are two separate things…
Without punishment nothing will get done in Nigeria. The small holder farmers that wrecked me, took all the money, they are still waiting for another victim. I must state that a state of emergency should be declared on agriculture, because that is the most important aspect of our life.
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