WEDNESDAY COLUMN BY USSIJU MEDANER
info@medaner.com, justme4justice@yahoo.com
2023 is not all about street talks. Not about emotion springs and definitely, not about senseless and immoral endorsements. Nigeria is a nation begging for consistencies in programs for self-sufficiency, local productivity and favourable exchanges with the other global societies. Changing our non-palatable economic narrative, the continuous unfavourable and affective currencies exchange rate, the biting inflation and even the consequent insecurity, would be a product of conscious and steadfast investment in national productivity. It is high time we brought to the fore individuals who believe in and possess the capacity to drive the industrialisation of this country; we cannot go to sleep with the burden of transforming our nation on the shoulder of men who are shrewd businessmen, surviving on gross importation of finished product as a means of survival.
The elements of national industrialisation hinge first on agricultural development and sufficiency, from where processing industries spring up to process excess crops, livestock and allied primary products. A hungry nation cannot be a productive nation. For all developed nations, national development hinges on two critical supports historically: agricultural development and industrialisation, especially technology/steel development. Aside from guaranteeing food security for the nation, agricultural sufficiency directly translates to industrial development as inputs to most producing factories are sourced from agriculture.
If we are going to get it right and lay the real foundation for total development of Nigeria, we must begin by getting it right in the agricultural sector. When we take advantage of our resources and produce food for the teeming population of the country, we will be on the right trajectory to the greater future that we dream of. That is one of the very many things the present Administration of President Muhammadu Buhari gets right with the development of the local rice production capacity and sufficiency for the country.
Earlier in the post-independence history of Nigeria, the consecutive leaderships were determined to accelerate the pace of development of the regional and national economic growths via direct and maintained huge investment in Agriculture. The hopes of Nigerians were heightened by the huge investment and expectation from the growing agricultural sector. It was the major income earner for the nation and the major employer of labour across turfs.
With huge foreign exchange earnings and government revenues, reliance on agriculture made development of major export crops more rapid. Infant factories sprang up in every corner of the country; employment opportunities abound and incidents of rural-urban migration were at its minimum.
That was the time when the sector was accounting for a significant (65%) share of the national GDP and total export as well as employing the bulk of the nation’s labour force. That was the time when most Nigerians were farmers and the Nigeria governments at all levels were both farmers and coordinator of farmers.
Unfortunately, the sector began a decline from the 1970s with inflow of revenues from crude oil and the subsequent deliberate progressive neglect of the sector by the subsequent government; constituting a decline of the GDP from 65 percent in the 1960s to 34 percent in 1974 and 8.0 percent in 2005. This ought not to be but for the poor economic principle of our leaders who chose the abandonment of the agriculture sector at the emergence of crude oil.
Managing the sector alongside the emerging petroleum industry would have meant effective diversification of the economy, which would have resulted in a significant rise in total GDP with the accompanying increased employment opportunities, economic development and stability. Instead, we chose to neglect the ever abundant prospect of the fertile lands that can support all crops all over the country; the all season rivers and coastlines bordering the Atlantic Ocean and the livestock industry to the detriment of the nation’s economy and development.
We remove all attention and needed incentives from these growth inspiring sector; farming and other agricultural practices that could ameliorate our unemployment crisis, reduce cost of food items, raise the national GDP and give rise to springing up of factories within the agriculture industry, are left rudimentarily and with almost zero governmental input if not in the most corrupt form of public waste and embezzlement.
The neglect of the sector began the paralysis of the industrial sector in Nigeria as raw materials which came from the sector dwindled and were no longer forthcoming. As a result of the neglect and the consequent recession and austerity, there arose a total declining change in the industrial sector performance leading to contraction of the economy, decline in disposable incomes and substantial drop in domestic demand for industrial goods and then mass retrenchment of the industrial labour force.
The business opportunities, for instance, for red palm oil production globally are quite robust and impressive. Palm oil makes up nearly 50 percent of all global edible oil consumption. Currently, Malaysia and Indonesia are the dominating power in palm oil production and presently supply more than 72 percent of the global market worth hundreds of millions of dollars every year.
Ironically, up till the late 1960s, Nigeria was the heartbeat of global palm oil production producing close to 43 percent of all palm oil consumed worldwide but today we produce only 2 percent of the total global market.
In the late 1950s, Malaysia came to Nigeria to understudy our oil palm system and returned back to overthrow us and has become the largest global producer of the commodity as at 1966. A report credited to the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) states that, if Nigeria had maintained its market dominance in the palm oil industry, the country would have been earning approximately $20 billion annually from the cultivation and processing of palm oil as at today.
But that bold loss is nothing when we evaluate what southern Nigeria, once prided as the oil palm hub of the world has become; a docile, non-industrialised region with a huge population of disoriented youths and the cry of marginalisation. If the oil palm industry was still bubbling, maybe there would not have been IPOB and the high aversion and resentment from that part of the country today.
While the South was producing oil palm, the West was topping the list in cocoa production. Across the western states, cocoa plantation was the deal and the western government’s effort at building the famous Cocoa House at Ibadan was the icing on the cake. It is a fact that outside the massive contribution to the center, the early envious development of the west both in education and infrastructure were made possible only by the revenues from the cocoa enterprise.
At that time, Nigeria and a few African countries were responsible for about 71 percent of the global cocoa production; that figure has since dropped significantly to about 59 percent as at today with Nigeria constituting a major percentage of the decline. From being a major and leading exporter of the crop, we have dropped to fourth globally and still going down as our trees are getting old and weak without fresh plantation replacements. In 2010, cocoa only managed to account for 0.3 percent of our agricultural GDP and it has not gotten better till date.
Finally, cotton production and the groundnut pyramids of northern Nigeria have become a story and lesson that our children learn in schools. While the north, unlike the other regions, did not totally abandon agriculture, the groundnut and cotton industries were not lucky; they are dead.
When we lost it, a new dispensation began in Nigeria; the rush for government jobs, overpopulation of our cities, massive unemployment, increasing crimes and insecurity, and on the economic front, increasing and massive dependent and important of common and staple foods such as rice as well as processed livestock which contribute immensely to the weakening of the naira against the dollar and other currencies, and most importantly the onset of food instability in Nigeria.
Done with what has gone wrong, there have been efforts especially since 1999 by the government to revamp the agriculture sector of the economy. The administration of president Olusegun Obasanjo banned the importation of a number of staple foods and frozen chicken to encourage local production but decisive and conscious policy decisions to encourage the farmers to take advantage of the move were not taken by the government; besides, our borders policing structure were literally ineffective that smuggling of the very banned items continued unabated. The little success recorded was in the market for frozen chicken, though many were of the opinion that the ban on frozen livestock was very successful because the president (Obasanjo) was one of the biggest beneficiaries!
The administration of President Goodluck Jonathan had many paperwork decisions to encourage mass investment and participation in crops production and processing; the investment in national cassava to flour project is a typical example; that is, expecting the success of the cassava to flour project would have been a big plus for the nation but somehow, we lost out of that possibility; the project failed woefully.
The current Administration of President Muhammadu Buhari has its hands on several crops production rejuvenation but what strikes the most is the success already recorded in the rice revolution of the Administration, as Nigeria’s status has changed remarkably from being a major rice importing country to a rice producing nation, and still, with the aspiration to export in the nearest future. The Nigerian population of about 190 million consume approximately 6.7 million tonnes of rice annually at a cost of N0.59 trillion annually. As of today, we produce almost 80 percent of all rice consumed in the country locally.
Taking a cue from the success recorded in the rice revolution, we can only realise that replicating the same across all other crops of interest only requires that we do the same thing that has been done to achieve what we are achieving in the rice production and processing efforts. First, we must highlight the crops of interest and make the decisive commitments to make the farmers go to the farm. Secondly, we must guarantee a market that would not compete with foreign counterparts’ crops.
The Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu agricultural blueprint is a pointer to a reinvigorating agricultural sector. It is time we returned to the same national agricultural policy of the 1960; the government must be fully involved in the entire line process of crop production as well as livestock production. Government investment backed with an efficient control mechanism must be feasible in the sector. We must revisit the oil palm industry; if we had the capacity once, we can even do much better now. We must do the same across board for the revival of the groundnut pyramid and cocoa plantation respectively.
We must make a coordinated effort to redirect a bulk of the unemployed population of Nigerians to the agriculture sector by way of creating incentives that will lure in as many as possible into the sector.
This is why I make the case for government to open up the agriculture sector to absorb more willing participants. Only in the last few years, the rice industry has generated lasting jobs for hundreds of thousands of Nigerians across its value chain (though this is not captured by NBS), so we could have well over 60 percent of all currently unemployed Nigerians engaged in the sector from input production, to crop production to processing, storage, exportation and finally marketing.
Finally, I would suggest a policy framework that will design a cooperative venture between the government and all graduates of agriculture and related courses in all institutions in Nigeria, beginning from their NYSC participation. The scheme could become the national springboard to Nigeria’s reentrant into its glorious massive food production days and also as the catalyst to the transformation of the sector to the stage of increasing manufacturing via processing of agricultural raw materials and coordinated commerce.
God Bless The Federal Republic Of Nigeria!
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