Why did Tinubu forget agriculture in his independence speech?

On Sunday, October 1, 2023, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu addressed Nigerians in commemoration of the country’s 63rd independence. He touched on so many crucial issues demanding urgent attention from the government. He pledged to address unemployment, poverty, insecurity and to modernise the country’s economy.  

However, what he should be reminded is that fixing all these problems without giving due attention to agriculture is like a soup without tasty ingredients. Agriculture plays a key role in boosting food security and self-sufficiency in food production, supporting job creation and encouraging economic development of a country.  

Therefore, I was taken aback when Tinubu failed to touch on agriculture, which plays a vital role in invigorating the economy of any nation. If we recall, during his campaign, he pledged to turn the fertile soil of Northern Nigeria into grain fields and bring back the lost rank of the country as the food basket of the world. There are so many important questions here such as why he forgot to touch this crucial sector in his speech.   

Today, the technological march to renewable energy and Electric Vehicles (EVs) is raising alarm for an oil-dependent nation like Nigeria before it is too late since the days of crude oil are numbered. Nigeria’s authorities must wake up and grapple with this.

FG tasked on digital rights democratization

ACCI urges FG to implement policies for economic revival

It is undeniable that Nigeria is highly endowed with a vast array of arable land and human resources, who are mostly idle youths. The country will be able to hit so many birds with one stone by moving to agriculture.   

In his speech, Tinubu promised to address rural poverty, hunger, skyrocketing prices of food items and massive unemployment. But what he should know is that all these problems could be addressed by making agriculture more inclusive, sustainable and productive.         

Nigeria should replicate the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE’s) National Food Security Strategy 2051 which aims to put the country at the top of the Global Food Security Index by 2051 through setting out visionary plans to ensure sustainable food production by using modern technology. If a small country like UAE which population is 9,516,871 million (2023) can go all out to turn its desert land into fertile farms in order to achieve food security with the aim of reducing its heavy reliance on imported food, what about Nigeria which population is 225,151,187 (2023) people and has an estimation of 70.8 million hectares of abundant arable land?   

The attention of Tinubu should be brought to the fact that the significance of agriculture for the country cannot be underestimated towards strengthening socio-economic growth of the country as it contributes more to the country’s GDP than petroleum, employing 70 per cent of the workforce and reducing poverty and hunger.   

Tinubu should spare no effort to rescue the agricultural sector of the North which is the backbone of the region from incessant growing invasions of banditry, desertification, floods and other insecurities bred by the devastating sweeping impact of climate change. He should also sink huge funds into this pre-eminent sector by designing special programmes and supporting real commercial dry-season farmers. Tinubu is also supposed to revive the Anchor Borrower Programme (ABP) of the CBN and support millions of real smallholder farmers across the region.   

Mustapha Baba Azare, Bauchi State [email protected]