There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm, notes Aldo Leopold in A Sand County Almanac; one is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other, is that heat comes from the furnace.
For the benefit of the superficial Millennial or Gen Z-er, the Curmudgeon paints a more fascinating picture of the source of all wealth. And in the true spirit of his portraiture, I’d say: Imagine yourself a ghommid, standing smack in the centre of Nigeria’s groundnut pyramids, animal ranches, and cocoa plantations, several decades ago.
You take your ghommid’s shears and cut down surrounding flora to make a clearing for a farm. As the crops flower and animals fatten, you harvest the best grains and herd all the supple livestock into a giant pile, wave a magic wand, and it’s all turned into industry, buildings, and people spattered across gated high society and sprawling boondocks. You name this ‘progress’ and feign mutation from ghommid to giant.
Such is the relationship between cities and the countryside, the modern and out-of-date, the dwindling past, and the silicon age. We must understand, however, that mortal Nigeria as the metaphorical giant is nothing but a dispensable minion in the economics of life.
A Nigerian prototype of America’s Silicon Valley is the Millennial and Gen Zer’s most astute retort to the declining world foisted upon all by the older generation. But this has done too little to improve our fortunes. Ultimately, the burgeoning I.T. sector fosters ephemeral growth, rather than give relief, it delivers a Siamese bundle of utopia and dystopia in one birth.
Young Nigeria, like the rest of the world, is besotted by this twin grotesqueness for its dazzle and espoused freedoms. More fascinating are the manifestations of the now ubiquitous start-up and fintech. A peculiar thing is happening: where the government fails to show up, foreign financiers or angel funders, if you like, are extending their interventions with curious funding.
Of course, nobody sees anything wrong with this. How could anyone deem such interventions scary in a world where oligarchs maul promising youths into armed bandits, career assassins, political hooligans, murderers, arsonists, and so on, while they embezzle public funds to entertain their wives and educate their children abroad?
Thus the argument is that angel funding is great for the economy. These seed monies – irrespective of their slush equivalents used for funding regime change and dubious political springs worldwide – are filling a crucial void in empowering youths who would otherwise be unemployed and left out of the loop of social interventions.
Not all ‘seed money’ is a slush fund; a few agricultural startups have sprouted from the seeds of angel funders with stakes in diverse sectors of the agricultural economy. Some of their interventions subsist in the production of palm kernel oil (PKO) which is still currently inadequate for the companies that use it as raw material.
Then some support farmers’ scale-up from peasant farming to commercial farming by providing extension services, quality seeds, access to finance, access to mechanization, and general advisory services on new and innovative methods in farming.
These appreciable interventions deserve sustainable partnership between the government and the so-called angel funders of Nigeria’s Silicon Valley. But technology, like the crude oil boom, is Janus-faced, often manifesting as development’s womb and tomb.
Little wonder Silicon Valley subsists as the playground of nerds and mindless herds on a leash. It is also the modern arena of the surveillance state, our private perversions and mob wars: government and the governed, husbands and wives, parents and children, lovers and their sexual nemesis, politicians and electorate, clash like gladiators – their mismatched whims the tools of shredding and seizure.
The history of technology has often been characterized by a debate between enamoured romantics and dismissive sceptics. Neither divide, however, projects a convincing response to the opportunities and challenges that new technologies present; both in turn often exaggerate or downplay the impact of technology, and this leads to entrenched positions and polarization.
Such entrenched positions can be harmful even if politically correct and more media-friendly than the highly differentiated analysis fostered by reality and careful, longitudinal research.
Advocates of technology integration in agriculture must understand the discourses that drive it and, in some cases, harm its acceptance, and find a balance between the technological innovations that can be sustained by sound policies and those driven more by Machiavellian interests.
Technology is useless if it isn’t humane and doesn’t improve life. Given the soil’s contribution to all life and wealth, technology must be deployed to enhance its healing and restorative properties by which disease passes into health, age into youth, and death into life.
The wellspring of wealth is agricultural surplus, the ability to feed more than one with the labour of one. Agricultural surplus built the groundnut pyramids of the north and the cocoa plantations of the southwest.
Agriculture became the mainstay of Nigeria’s economy and the foundation upon which the pioneer nationalists launched their agitation for independence.
Nigeria was a leading agricultural economy in the 1950s, being the largest producer of palm oil, groundnut, cotton, and cocoa globally. The sector employed over 70 per cent of the labour force and accounted for as much as 62.3 per cent of the nation’s foreign exchange earnings.
World Bank data reveal that agriculture contributed over 60 per cent to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Even so, the sector grapples with a poor land tenure system, deficient irrigation farming, climate change, and land degradation. Others are low technology, high production cost and poor distribution of inputs, limited financing, high post-harvest losses, and poor access to markets.
These challenges have stifled agricultural productivity, affecting the sector’s contribution to the country’s GDP. It has also led to increased food imports amid skyrocketing population and declining levels of food sufficiency.
For instance, between 2016 and 2019, Nigeria’s cumulative agricultural imports stood at N3.35 trillion, four times higher than the agricultural export of N803 billion within the same period.
Of its 92.4 million hectares, Nigeria boasts 82.0 million hectares of arable land; so far, just 34 million hectares of it have been cultivated. With population explosion and the government’s renewed drive to boost food security, agriculture has become increasingly crucial to our survival as a nation.
But caught between the womb walls of the crude oil creeks and big tech, Nigeria lives imprisoned in starvation’s bower. The country asphyxiates amid deathly oil spills, stolen crude oil, misgovernance, and the tinseled serpents of Silicon Valley.
We live in dire need of irrigated farmlands but our people shed more blood to irrigate the seasons; think farmers-herders clashes over grazing pasture and arable land.
Yet Nigeria is lost to her Silicon Valley treats. What do we eat when the dazzle dims to a dwindle, as the oil boom did, and all innovations do, eventually? Like Cadmus sowing dragon’s teeth, shall we plant yesterday’s corpses and harvest them as fresh food for our bellies?
The first supermarket, Kingsway Stores, appeared in the Nigerian landscape in 1948. Since then Nigeria has showcased dazzling groceries across a burgeoning wholesale-retail complex.
Against the backdrop of it all, the old farm fades into patterns and cycles of strife. Remember when we grew food in our gardens, forests, and farm settlements? Remember when fresh harvest nestled in our pantries, the basement, and our backyards?
Today, it’s beyond the reach of everyone.
