FIIRO has been at the head of cassava initiative, what is the fate of the bill before the National Assembly?
We are still trying to push it. We have not been able to get the bill into the National Assembly. If you recall during the administration of President Olusegun Obasanjo, we were able to push the cassava initiative and the plan was for it to be legislated into law. Unfortunately it was not successful, so right now we are also going through the process to see if at least we can get the 20percent inclusion legislated into law. A couple of months back we revealed the policy direction of what we want, just to have a clear picture of the policy direction and then come up with a draft bill, we have our draft bill but we are looking also at the policy, streamlining the two, and we hope that it will eventually scale through.
What impact will this legislation make?
If we are successful to get this into law, it’s a very major step towards reduction of unemployment because if you look at that value chain alone, the high quality cassava flour production, that particular production is going to pull a value chain, a value chain that creates about 3million jobs, because 20 percent inclusion is going to be saving this country about 127 billion naira in importation of wheat. If this is plough back into the system, it’s going to assist also in creation of jobs. The beauty of it is not even the foreign exchange or the money you are saving but the fact that you will be needing about 5, 000 small scale businesses to produce the 20percent inclusion and if you have that, you can have a multiply effect. So, the opportunities are there and this is a crop of relative advantage to this country, because it even grows under a very harsh condition, it needs minimal cultivation.
What can you say about other commodities value chains?
If you look at other commodities like rice, yam, all the tubers, we are really blessed in Nigeria. We have no business having this unemployment, once we have established the micro small medium enterprises, many countries have done it and it has been found to be a very effective way of leaping any country out of poverty or shooting them into industrial nations. We have all it takes, FIIRO is a technology provider, the book that was published contained jjob opportunities in all the 774 local governments in Nigeria, it is a good reference book for state and local governments. We took the book, actually itemised the raw materials of relative advantage in each local government in Nigeria and then attached an FIIRO’s feasibility report. So it’s a fast reference point where you are not going to make any mistake and the book is being recommended for all, so that any local government can check the most appropriate technology that it can start with and the technology are quite cheap, ranging from about 50 thousand, to about 100 million, you can scale up, you can start small.
Apart from the youth, how do you empower women with some of these technologies?
We are also very gender sensitive, because if you train a woman, you have trained the whole nation. That is why we are very gender sensitive, you can’t believe that even the technology of glucose production which is high tech, has been domesticated to the extent that even the local women can actually produce glucose from cassava, using rudimentary equipment. It takes a lot of research work to get a technology which is high-tech for the use of rural women. So the local woman can produce glucose and send it to a collecting centre where the industrialist can pick up the glucose, then refine it and use it, in the pharmaceutical, in the beverages and in all aspects of industrial development. That is why we try as much as possible to domesticate some of our technologies to the level that the rural woman can use. Kunu, for instance, is a beverage, that is very refreshing and it’s a very good carrier of most nutrient, it’s a well recommended beverage which is unique to Nigeria, it’s a cereal based beverage but once it is prepared, it last less than 24 hours, if it is not consumed within that time you don’t get the beverage again. But we have been able to develop this beverage to the extent that it can stay up to one year if it is well packaged and it has export potentials and we have been training many women in the technology because usually it’s women who get involved in this Kunu production, men are also invited because now we have upgraded that technology. The main technology of bottling and preservation and keeping that Kunu for 1year and retaining its integrity has been transferred to many women. We recently trained women in Kunu production in Minna, and Lagos. Kunu is good to break the fast, when the body is heavily depleted of major nutrients, it’s a very good refreshing drink that can replenish most nutrients and stabilise the homeostatic condition before you start loading yourself with food. We encouraged the transfer of this technology to Muslim women.
