What are your views on Nigeria’s trajectory in agricultural development?
By and large, agricultural development is not moving at the expected pace for a big country like Nigeria. With vast arable land, large number of the cheapest labour in the world and with the resources at Nigeria’s disposal particularly from crude oil, we ought to have maximised our diversification into agriculture especially when you juxtapose all these with the fact that over 70% of our people are employed in agriculture. It is rather unfortunate. In other advanced countries, we have less number of people (some 5%, some 10%) actually involved in agriculture and producing all that is needed not only for consumption but for export, for industry and value addition. But here, because of dearth of technological advancement and lack of mechanization, we still continue to emphasise what we call small scale holder scheme and that cannot solve our problem.
The bits and pieces coming from our farmers can never be enough to run a viable agro-industry, which will be capable of employing more people, talk less of the export level commodities that we are all expecting. So, I am of the view that with the vast resources at our disposal and the vast arable lands, we ought to have gone beyond all these small scale implements (hoes and cutlasses) into mechanisation and applying modern day technology and then going full blast on to large scale production.
What do you think is Nigeria’s performance with regards to budgetary allocation to agriculture?
I acknowledge that Nigeria is very good with policy design but the implementation is the problem. All the plans in the transformation agenda can only gather dust if there is no adequate backing with funds. The best of ideas can never translate to reality if there are no funds. It has been rightly observed that in the last three years, the allocation for agriculture has remained constantly below 2%. Out of this 2% between N65 billion and N71 billion for the entire country, the recurrent expenditure is between 60% and 70%. At the end of the day, what is left for capital expenditure or infrastructural investment is probably less than N30 billion. This amount in a year, I can assure you, is not enough to take charge of a state’s rural development not to talk of 36 states in Nigeria. So, it is like we are deceiving ourselves. We are dissipating energy unnecessarily writing the blue prints that will not see the light of day. It is pitiful. It is labour loss.
What about getting back the young people to agriculture?
A radical problem requires a radical solution. Among the Yoruba, there is a popular song that says “ise agbe ni ise ile wa, eni ko s’ise, a ma j’ale” meaning that farming is our occupation, anybody who does not farm, will steal. What is happening is that young people have lost the significance of farming and this requires that we have to train our younger generation and give them proper re-orientation right from their tender age. We should be able to remodel the curricula from primary to tertiary level.
We should make agriculture as a subject compulsory at the primary, secondary and even as a core base subject like the general studies course for all disciplines in the university or other tertiary levels. Also, practical agriculture in schools should be promoted especially in our older universities where less than 25% of the land is actually built up. This provides opportunity to encourage students to engage in agriculture while they are being trained. Students can also be given the opportunity to earn a living by working on school farms and supplement their cost of education. They can also learn all the steps of agricultural production and value addition in the various value chains. This can expose them to the alternatives available in the agriculture sector so that on graduation from any course or at any level, youth would have the choice, other than in their main courses of specialization, to create jobs for themselves and employ other people. This can be a defense in the fight against unemployment and the rising youth restiveness we are experiencing in the country.
Another perspective which I have advocated for is that, as millions are entering the job market every year after graduation, their certificates should be as good as any other collateral. The government should serve as guarantors for these certificates being held and instead of looking for white collar jobs, we can give them three years’ advance earnings as loans and a moratorium of one year to take-off so that they can also within the space of five years become employers of labour rather than looking for jobs. By the fifth year, all the injected funds will continue to be self-revolving and only marginal replenishment will be made for the number of new entrants into the sector. In addition to that, these young graduates could decide on their own that they choose to drop their other vocations for agriculture. This is because they see that there is money in agriculture.
