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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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…………….
