Solving Nigeria's Agro Challenges the Ethiopian Way

Nigerians are not lazy. I meet enough people everyday, I interact with some, I watch others closely and I befriend a few. In nearly all cases, I see only people who are willing to work their way out of poverty.
You just have to show them how.

                                                                 Audu Ogbeh, Minister for Agriculture

This is where I think the government has failed.

The FG is screaming itself hoarse on national radio/television, the pages of newspapers and the likes to convince people to return to the farms. But it's been all noise no substance. The results have been pathetic. There are still more unemployed Nigerians than the employed and the situation continues to worsen.

Elected leaders may go about recruiting more men and women into the police, military, civil service and such state and federal agencies but the obvious truth is that no government can effectively employ its entire citizenry.
It's not possible in tiny Togo how much more the most populous black nation on the face of the earth!

A wise government recognizes this and channel majority of its efforts towards inspiring its populace towards fending for and feeding itself.

This is where I commend the Ethiopian Farm Model. Needless to say, there are so many lessons we can pick from our eastern brothers.

Ethiopia is the second most populous nation on the black continent with almost 100million people, yet she's able to grow enough to feed her people and even have some more for export.
The Horn of Africa is one of the largest producers and exporters of coffee, maize and cereals in Africa.

The government of the East Africa nation commits about 15% of the budget yearly to support agriculture and aggressively attracts international organizations like the Bill & Belinda Gates Foundation to help drive its farming policies and empower its mostly smallholder farmers.

As gigantic as the Nigerian budget is constructed annually, never have we devoted 5% to the agricultural sector. In fact, recently, it has mostly hover around the 1.5% mark. That's paying lip service to the Transformation Agenda in that sector.

We can fool no one but ourselves. If this regime is serious about providing jobs for the majority of its educated and uneducated folks, the answer is not in trading blames, importing goods, establishing more federal agencies, recruiting more into the civil service, or providing free daily breakfast for all unemployed youths. The answer lies in investing smartly in agriculture .

And it all starts with the 2016 budget!

Agriculture: the wealth-creator we continue to ignore

Despite our seemingly endless reserve of oil, Nigerians are still some of the poorest people in the world. A lot of the newly born babies die of malnutrition. The majority of the youth are unemployed. And most of the elderly who are lucky to live past the age of 60 retire into poverty and depression.

In the last three decades, the country has made trillions of dollars in revenue ensuring that it has emerged has one of the largest economies in the world. It beats reasoning then how her huge wealth has not reflected in the purchasing power of her large populace. Incredibly, with the largest black population in the world, it is sickening to know that the entire wealth of this African giant is concentrated in the hands of less than 1% of her over 170 million people.

A lot of solutions have been proffered by experts to help chart a way for the common man to elevate himself from the pit of poverty. 

Yet the Nigerian economy is not looking so good, especially for the employees and the new school leavers. The mining sector is in comatose. The manufacturing firms have been hit by energy shortages and policy mismanagement. Those in the transportation business would do much better if our roads and railways were even up to scratch. And education is in a worse state than a dying child.

The internet came and, after an initial skepticism, has been generally welcomed and used to ease the stress of getting complex things done. It has opened new employment opportunities, no doubt, but it still has not transformed into the wealth-making machine the masses longed for.

Is it time then to give up and give in to death?

Far from it!

Agriculture can thrive where oil failed. It cannot, fortunately, be confined in the hands of a small, powerful cartel. And it can drive growth, feed the people and sustain development.

It already is the largest sector of the Nigerian economy and employs two-thirds of the entire labour force. However, increasing population combined with several other pertinent factors have kept agricultural productivity very low.

At this stage, we have the potential but we are not producing enough to feed our countrymen and women. Nigeria is currently one of the largest producers of rice in Africa and simultaneously one of the largest rice importers in the world.

Sadly, rice is not the only agricultural product that Nigeria can produce massively but still imports.

The country imports about 60 percent of the fish consumed. There are large imports of livestock and livestock products daily. About 30 percent of live animals slaughtered in Nigeria are imported from neighbouring countries. Some imported items like Palm oil, refined sugar and paste of tomatoes are actually a slight on our agricultural ego.

We cannot continue to ignore the potential of agriculture to transform an ailing economy into a healthy, wealth-creating one.