“About a 100 or 150 trucks load yams here from now till May, every day. Yet, there is no day that yams are bought completely, since I started coming to this market 40 years ago,” Julius Tsutsu, the grandson of Zaki Biam Ala Aku, said.
Mr Tsutsu has been a farmer for the past 70 years of his life, and as a grandson of Biam Ala Aku, the local chief who established the market, he appears to know every bit of the history of one of the oldest markets in Tiv land. It is not only one of the oldest, it is the only one in Tiv land that buys and sells week long unlike other village markets that buy and sell only once a week. Farmers start to bring their produce to the market on Monday and by Saturday when it is the official day for the market, everywhere is crammed and you would have to wrestle your way through a crowd of villagers before you can get to the part of the market you want to get to.
“The market has expanded but we the farmers still face the same problems we faced about 40 years ago. In those days, the land was fertile and we didn’t need fertilizer to produce high yields but these days, if you don’t apply fertilizer on the farm, it is as good as you have wasted your time and the problem is that fertilizer is not available. Even when government procures it, it is at the middle of the farming season when you don’t need fertilizer that they will start to sell. Even then, it is government officials and politicians who get fertilizer, not we farmers. They hoard the fertilizer and sometimes divert it to Taraba and even Cameroun to sell,” he lamented, adding that even when they get, because of ignorance, sometimes they apply it wrongly and that destroys their yams, saying, however, that his experience in farming has shown him that NPK 15:15:15 and Golden Urea are the best fertilizer to apply on yams.
He said when he started farming in the 60s, he would produce a lot of yams without applying fertilizer or herbicides or insecticides. “Then we didn’t have fertilizer or herbicides or insecticides but the land was fertile so we produced a lot of yams and the only thing we could do then was to marry wives who could help us on the farm,” he said.
Mr Tsutsu said he married six wives and has countless concubines to help him on the farm because he farmed over 100 lines of heaps of yams (size of yam farm is measured by lines of heaps) and needed hands to plant, weed and harvest the farm, saying if not for the availability of herbicides and insecticides, it would not have been possible to continue farming because of the havoc beetles and termites and other stubborn weeds cause to yams.
He said the yam market has grown more than its peers like Kyado, Anyiin, Ugba and others because of the hospitality of his grandfather, who was Tor Agbande in Ukum and had the right to establish a market. Tor Agbande was a title for a clan chief that had spiritual power called Tsav, to look after the welfare of his subjects. Such chiefs were the only ones who had the powers, especially, spiritual powers to establish markets, as markets in Tiv land were thought to be havens of evil spirits.
So that was how the Zaki-Biam market started under a huge, shady Akinde tree that provides shade for humans and birds. Now the yam market is located at least, a half kilometre away from the old market, yet it has not taken off the shine on the old market. It is the noisiest part of the entire market. Under the Akinde tree, joyous, loquacious men and women, both young and old, sit on wooden benches round large jars of Burukutu, the local brew gulping government’s approved brew from small calabashes. Young girls saunter round with trays of peppered chicken, fish and fried white melon, looking for customers and perhaps, young men who will make passes at them. Some of the drinking lot nod gently to the drumming and music played by local musicians while the tipsy ones stamp their feet hard on the ground and twist their body and arms to the rhythm of the music.
Away from the old market, the pothole filled road to the new yam market is dusty and a ride on the bike to the place is bumpy. Heaps of yams in open air zinc sheds would capture your attention. But more fascinating is the handiness with which young men push truckloads of yams to tailboards of lorries as others throw same into the lorries.
Aondoaseer Shamo has been loading yams into lorries for the past four years and he told our correspondent that he makes at least N8, 000 everyday at the market. According to him, 100 yams cost N135 to load and he earns N15, 000 or N10, 000 per lorry, depending on the capacity of the lorry.
For Aondohemba Terzungwe who is an orphan, marking yams buys him food and pays his school fees. He said he marks up to 4, 000 yams a day at the rate of N70 per 100 yams. The JSS three student said he comes to the market only late on Fridays and Saturdays to mark yams with the initials or trademark of the buyer.
The market is a lure to so many people, even within the Tiv nation. People from other clans and districts come to settle there. Mr Peter Mbaageeyongo is 87 years old and he said the market lured him away from his native clan, Tombo, in Buruku local government of Benue State, over 60 years ago.
“I came to Zaki-Biam from Tombo since I was in my early 20s and I sojourned with Nyaku Biam, son of Biam Ala Aku, who was then the head of the market. The Biam family was very hospitable so I have been able to establish myself here as a farmer and a yam trader. I have married so many wives and given birth to many children. So for me, that is great success. I wouldn’t have hoped for success greater than that,” he said.
But the old man lamented the rate at which yams rot, saying, they incur heavy losses as half of the stored yams get rotten. According to him, they have been using their native intelligence to preserve the yams from November-December till May-June by storing them in well ventilated sheds and covering them with hay, or the newly harvested yams that are still moisty are put in pits and covered with moist earth, when they have to do that for six months, yams still rot and they are hoping that modern technology will find a better means of preserving the yams.
Dr Emmanuel Ingbian who is a senior lecturer in the Department of Food Science and Technology, University of Agriculture, Makurdi, told our correspondent that yams belong to roots and tubers and are perishable because of their high moisture content. “When they are harvested, the high moisture makes them amenable to infection. So one of the key things to do which does not require any technology is handling. During the harvest, harvest yams in such a way that minimal damages or bruises to the skin of the yam is done and as you are transporting the yams, you transport them under conditions that will avoid injury to the yams because those injuries serve as avenues for microbial infections,” he said.
He maintained that for long term storage, yams need to be kept under cool and controlled environment, as yams left under uncontrolled conditions, dehydrate and become unpalatable. “Usually, fresh yam tubers are also classified as vegetables. So where you have an evaporative system where the yams are not exposed to adverse environmental conditions particularly as is prevalent in the tropical region of which Nigeria is one, then you discover that you can control the rate of dehydration,” he said.
Dr. Ingbian also said yams that are sprouted are also spoilt because the starch in them is consumed by the sprouts, and so are no longer palatable, saying anti-sprouting agents can be applied to prevent the sprouting.
“In terms of storage to extend the shelf life of yams that are harvested to an appreciable period, these are some of the measures that you can take. But beyond that, yams can be processed into more stable products. Locally, technologies exist that you can convert your fresh yam tubers into yam chips, which when finally reduced to yam flour, can closely resemble pounded yam. What we normally refer to as poundo-yam. If farmers are aware that when yams are subjected to certain basic pre-treatment conditions, and are dried under certain controlled conditions, can be converted to yam chips and later yam flour and can be packaged and made an export commodity,” he said.
For Tyosue Gbajime, who is a middleman in the market and at the same time Personal Assistant to the Chairman of the market, bad roads are a major problem for farmers and traders as some vehicles conveying yams from the farms to the market get stuck in mud and ditches, and when that happens, the yams are left at the mercy of the blazing sun.
He wondered why it has taken the state government so long to finish the Zaki-Biam-Afia road, urging the government to also construct the Zaki-Biam-Donga and Zaki-Biam- Chito roads to enhance easy transportation of agricultural produce to the markets. He said farmers are always neglected and called on government to provide electricity and water to farmers so that they too can live better lives. He also decried the attitude of security agents who, instead of protecting them, extort money from them.
For Baby Lagos who has been patronizing the Zaki-Biam market since 1994, the exploitation of middlemen, coupled with extortion by police at roadblocks and produce officials makes their trade very unprofitable. She buys yam from Zaki-Biam and sells in Benin, Edo State, but said she may stop coming to the market if these problems persist.
Nine years after marauding soldiers sacked Zaki-Biam, the farmers and traders there still bear the scars of the devastation they suffered in their subconscions. Tsutsu said he lost everything he had ever owned, except his family, when soldiers invaded Zaki-Biam in October 2001. “We all ran into the bush and left everything behind. The soldiers looted whatever they wanted to loot and the remnants thieves pillaged and we had to start all over again. Government refused to pay us compensation but we thank God we have gotten out of the ashes, faster than our enemies could ever have imagined,” he said.
Efforts to get the government of Benue state to speak on the issues of fertilizer and infrastructure that the farmers and traders raised failed as the Special Assistant to the Governor on Media, Mr Cletus Akwaya, abandoned our correspondent in his office in Makurdi and never came back, and even refused to pick his calls.
The Police Public Relations Officer (PPRO), ASP Opaluwa Aku, however, said the state command has not received any official report from farmers or traders that they were being intimidated and extorted.
