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Tuesday, July 23, 2013

NIGERIA: HOW WILL AGRICULTURE FARE UNDER A NORTHERN PRESIDENT?

Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, Minister of Agriculture

Minister of Agriculture Dr. Akinwumi Adesina is laying foundations and bringing new and exciting thinking into re-building Nigerian agriculture, but what happens to us when he and his principal Goodluck Jonathan leave?

Nigerian officials have historically maintained a dubious attitude to agricultural development and farmer welfare. What is said at public places do not usually reflect what is practiced as policy. Nigerian bureaucrats choose always to splash huge sums on grandiose projects with high decibels in publicity but with little or no impact on actual production and development in the sector. Farmer welfare comes last in government considerations.

Huge sums are lost, always, on overpriced contracts, the importation of useless equipment or payouts to Multilateral Agencies and Western Consultancy groups who mean no good to the development of Nigerian agriculture. We bear witness to the cesspools that the River Basin Development Authorities (RBDA) and the Agricultural Development Programme (ADP) championed by the Federal Agricultural Coordinating Unit (FACU), Ibadan, then headed by the zealous Professor Francis Idachaba and sponsored by the World Bank turned out to be, legacies of the “Integrated Development” model of Dr. Robert McNamara, president of the World Bank in the Seventies and Eighties.
Abandoned Rice Processing Plant, Omor, Anambra State.

Agricultural development was to be built around farmers in clusters surrounding the major rivers of Nigeria, the rivers themselves offering irrigation water and drainage all year round.

Fine policy that appeared to be. Trouble was that the billions of dollars offered by the World Bank in credit never got to Nigeria. A full sixty percent of the money was expended on the purchase of overpriced equipment and materials that were unsuitable for Nigerian agricultural practices and farming systems. The requirement to purchase Euro- American equipment was written into the fine prints of the contracts with the World Bank which was the first warning for failure. The balance 40% was mostly purloined by Nigerian officials.

The farm extension services personnel recruited for the projects were ill trained, unsupervised and preferred to gallivant around town with the motorbikes bought for the purpose rather than moving into farming communities as trainers of the farmers in the so-called modern practices.

Something shameful will be remembered of President of Nigeria at the time, Alhaji Shehu Shagari (1979-83) and his political Party National Party of Nigeria (NPN). They clutched at the World Bank projects like life rafts to save a failed agricultural policy. The prop slogan “Green Revolution” ended up creating a huge food deficit and a food import monopoly for party big wigs who brawled over import licenses.

The combined result of the World Bank sponsored projects and the food import license bonanza for the NPN mandarins was to effectively destroy the burgeoning growth in the agricultural sector particularly rice cultivation in Nigeria. Rice, sugar, wheat, corn, etc were labeled “scarce commodities” and put on the special import license list granted only to the NPN party moguls who went on to import these products with graft money from pre-bended contracts. A tidy monopoly was thus created for the few and the cost foisted on the rest of the Nation and its farmers. Thereafter, a dire import dependent food policy and a growing debt burden defined the national economy for the next three decades.

It must be remembered that Shehu Shagari and his NPN nurtured Nigeria’s imported rice dependency syndrome which will be near impossible for the Nigerian population to kick.

Shagari’s successors, Buhari, Babangida and Abacha all military despots and lacking imagination and patriotism and owing no obligation to Nigerians having come to Government through coups d’état, sustained Shagari’s practice of licensed food importation, creating a few billionaires in the midst of an increasingly impoverished farming population, a dangerous dependence on foreign, particularly Asian rice and now a devastated agricultural sector, lacking investment, infrastructure and a disorganized market overrun by imports from Asia.
Typical Rice Mill in Nigeria 2013.

Babangida did worse. He fashioned and implemented an ethnic economic agenda banning wheat importation (a crop not cultivated in Nigeria) to effectively put the
Flour Milling and brewing companies out of business, leading to the loss of nearly a million jobs in the milling, brewing, bakery, pastry and ancillary businesses. He then sold the entire country down the river with a dubious harmattan wheat cultivation project in Northern Nigeria paying out unbelievable sums to Hausa/Fulani contractors who after three years could not have a single bushel of wheat to show for all the tonnes of money.

Determined to crush the thriving poultry industry in Southern Nigeria, Babangida placed an absolute ban on corn and Feed imports into Nigeria, again destroying the Feed Milling industry and sending the entire poultry stock based mostly in Southern Nigeria to forced fire sales and closure.

Accusations of an ethnic agenda to destroy southern agricultural investments and force a dependency on Northern food products were mostly ignored by the Babangida Government. Neither could Babangida deny that Southern dominated poultry meat production was being forced to closure in order to open up a monopoly for Northern cow beef business.


What then will happen to southern agriculture under another northern president? Wait please for the next instalment…………….