Category: Thursday

How does one love or hate this country? To this, every likely answer may spiral into a fog or eclipse in a vapor of hanging participles. The ripostes may spatter and splay like a treacherous sandstorm but it’s about time we braved its tumult.

It’s about time we addressed our innate demons. Call it our stratagem of healing or therapy of closure from our national trauma.

Too many Nigerians drift through each day with a siege mentality – each individual treating the nation as a savage space, where ferocity is fostered and spuriously condoned.

From the northeast’s terror cells, bandit groves of the northwest, unknown gunmen of the southeast to the teen gangs and kidnappers of the southwest, Nigeria unfurls as scorched, bloodied earth.

Our killing fields are infinitely diverse and horrific. They are ever-changing: whether it’s the bloodied rice fields of Zabarmari, the war-torn villages of Doron Baga and Sambisa in Nigeria’s northeast;  the gory abattoirs of the southeast; the bandit-scourged villages of the northwest, or the haunted highways and farmlands of the southwest, Nigeria unfurls as a sprawling temenos, flourishing precinct of the proverbial grim reaper.

Through the death toll, a new monstrosity festers in the rage of university students protesting the prolonged strike by their lecturers. The students under the aegis of National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS), on Monday, blocked the road to the Murtala Muhammed International Airport (MMIA), Lagos, in protest against the lingering strike of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU).

As early as 7:00 am, the students, singing solidarity songs, blocked vehicular movement from the tollgate and major link to the international and domestic airport cargo terminals, thus paralyzing the flow of traffic and leaving travellers, airport workers, and motorists plying the Ajao Estate link road stranded.

In so doing, the students clearly demonstrate the siege mentality and selfishness characteristic of base Nigerian nature. Whatever their grievances, they aren’t enough reason to prevent fellow Nigerians from plying the road, using the public facilities of the airport, and engaging in lawful pursuit of their livelihoods.

By their action, the students impose untold hardship on other road users. If great care is not taken, the students’ protest could degenerate into more sinister forms.

Nigerians couldn’t have forgotten so easily, how the youths marched on the streets purportedly to protest bad policing, leadership failure, atrocious governance, corruption in government circuits, and insensibility of the political class.

We must remember #EndSARS for what it’s worth: its elegiac stanzas, propitious rage, and inauspicious demise. The tragedy caused by the protest is instructive; it bristles even as you read, with consequences of leadership insensibility and imprudence of youths cut to size. No thanks to hubris.

The #EndSARS protest was meant to rid the streets of corrupt police officers whose operations dawned on the country with a deathly couvade. In the same vein, the ongoing protests by the university students resonate in a troubling tenor. Its cultic maleficence resonates with the Nigerian psyche, thus the maxim: “There is a SARS in all of us” meaning: there is a savage (SARS) genome in every Nigerian.

For all its symbolism and contrived grandeur, the anti-strike protest manifests the bestial tells reminiscent of the ill-fated #EndSARS protest. The protesters surge with constraints emblematic of the anti-SARS herd feral, going by their conduct.

The #EndSARS eventually malformed into a carnival featuring disc jockeys (DJs), free meals, wild cavorting, and the profane. The violent aftermath was predictable as livestock and vegetables coming in from northern Nigeria via trucks got stuck in the traffic as a result of road blockages caused by the protesters.

While the Mile-12-bound vegetables rotted, the Kara cattle market at Ojodu Berger, allegedly responsible for about 90 percent of the meat supply in Lagos and environs, suffered a lull due to the protest, according to a certain Chief Ojukwu, in his analysis of the incident.

Going by his analogy, over 1,000 meat sellers, traders, and menial workers, who source their livelihood from the affected markets were rendered jobless. Urchins attached to the market and similar markets across Lagos were also rendered jobless, all at once. These are folk, who reportedly live from hand to mouth – surviving on meagre daily earnings.

Not minding the effects of the protests on these human segments, the protesters set up camps on Lagos streets “with music, free food, drinks, shisha, weed and all types of profanity. It was only a matter of time for the so-called touts, hoodlums, agberos to get drawn to another source of food!” argued Ojukwu.

Read Also: Poverty mentality or Uzodimma phobia?

The protesting students must eschew fractiousness and quit constituting a nuisance to law-abiding citizenry who must ply the airport corridor to eke their living.

Instead, they should take their grievances to the corridors of power in Abuja, in a peaceful protest.

They must understand the futility of embarking on yet another ill-omened sensationalist rally. They must also be circumspect of intervention from shady characters with intent to aggravate the conflict.

To what end has it served the cause of the university students to block the roads? Many applauded previous cheekiness displayed by the #EndSARS protesters. The worry lines were there but we ignored them arguing that the youths were finally becoming politically conscious.

People failed to look beneath the blankets of rage to see the true nature of dissent, its toxic traceries of thought, action, and reaction. While the tragic aftermath persists as a grisly narrative, its attendant pathos yields too easily to parody by fake news aficionados.

Whatever the renditions of the #EndSARS and the Lekki Toll Gate shooting, for instance, the pallid yarns of the incident resonate grotesquely, limiting and corrupting feelings, instead of freeing and deepening them.

We must avoid a reenactment of the stark horror birthed by the post #EndSARS carnage. We must shun insincere and mischievous dramatization of excessive plaint and hatred, the pitfalls of cynical revolt.

The exhumed and buried narratives of the #EndSARS hasten empathy and contempt for the university students as they insolently throng grief’s cottage.

But can misery so evident be sustained against the onslaught of hubris, insolence, morbid disregard for others’ rights, and the rule of law? Could the end justify the means of the disgruntled undergraduates railing against the political class and ASUU’s stinky quest to constrain their right to a decent education?

There is a tendency to empathise with the students given the government and ASUU’s recalcitrance to resolving the crisis. Yet base duplicity and sophistry are disguised dramas of the masterminds’ treacherous selves.

It is curious to see NANS reject an industrial court judgment, by Justice Polycarp Hamman on Wednesday, ordering ASUU to suspend its ongoing strike immediately, claiming it was a breach of Section 18(1)(2) of the Trade Disputes Act.

One would think the students would rather return to class and urge their lecturers to seek a more peaceful resolution of the conflict. But NANS’ spokesperson, Giwa Temitope, described the ruling as a “black market judgment,” stressing that the only remedy to this strike action is for the government to accede to the demands of ASUU and properly fund education.

Such outcomes, of course, can hardly be wrung, in a day, from the federal government’s practiced sidestep.

We must live wary of a relapse to the circumstances that birthed the #EndSARS carnage of 2020, the protesters have since dispersed into petulant segments and conflicting divides, their fraternal bond frayed to differences in politics and human experience.

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, 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 to 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.

Silicon Valley, the Millennial and Gen Z’s most astute retort to the declining world foisted upon all by the older generation has done too little to improve our fortunes.

Ultimately, the burgeoning I.T sector fosters ephemeral growth, rather than give relief, it midwifes 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, and understandably so.

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 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 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 there are those that 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 enamored romantics and dismissive skeptics. 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.

Read Also: FAO, NCC present revised national codex for standard food

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 percent of the labour force and accounted for as much as 62.3 percent of the nation’s foreign exchange earnings.

World Bank data reveal that agriculture contributed over 60 percent 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 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 the silicon valley, 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.

 

The Nigerian city achieves epic sweep. But it is superfluous to the country. That is why economic activities in most cities got grounded in the wake of COVID-19 as if industry and metropolis didn’t matter. Ask the Curmudgeon in his attic.

The same could hardly be said of the countryside; as pandemics and national emergencies persist, so does its rural economy. Yet cities parasitise the labour of the countryside. They sponge off rural sweat for ponds of sheen, and Nigerians wade through the lustre, bewitched. Cities charm residents. They turn citizens into metro pets and auspicious cash cows into silhouettes.

Cities deify sponge bobs but like Virgil would say, fortunate is the man who has come to know the gods of the countryside. Such a man, I would say, must have wandered its groves before its roads became too dangerous to traverse. Before cash crops and wildflowers were decimated by herdsmen and their ruck; before bucolic treasures frothed with pesticides and fishes floated belly-up in Ewekoro and the oil creeks.

Cities don’t produce food. They depend on the countryside to provide it. Save their food distribution systems, cities can quarantine, shut-in, and shut-down, so long as the countryside doesn’t.

True. A deeper look at our fate through the pandemic reveals how worthless the Nigerian city is, with its parade of glitz and chug-chug of industry. But for the country’s agricultural economy, Nigeria would starve.

Were he clairvoyant, President Muhammadu Buhari would commit even more vigorously to improving the agricultural economy. While his administration makes a great show of doing that, its federal pronouncements and gazetted schemes may become self-impeding calcification, in time.

The ongoing agricultural revitalisation, for instance, stifles by its magnification of tropes as truth, and slogans as change theory. Ask its touted and supposed beneficiaries. It’s all slick insentient theatre, majorly.

Perhaps the problem is not with the city; after all, what are cities but manufactured monoliths? City institutions, symbolized by government and industry, are built to serve individuals. Depending on the quality of leadership, however, their impersonal walls may deafen to the farmer’s cry and street sweeper’s sigh.

Of course, the Anchor Borrowers Programme (ABP), the Presidential Fertiliser Initiative (PFI), shutting the land borders against import and smuggling, and other protectionist policies are admirable in their mixed blessings but the skyscraper, big business, drone technology, and glorified slums become Nigeria’s face: abstract, mechanical, lifeless.

It takes a tremendous degree of lifelessness for corporate and government-fabricated Edens to thrive amid hedges of state shanties cum low-cost housing schemes and countrified dystopia.

It will be said of this administration too, that it found Nigeria a land of promise and rendered her promiscuous, if President Buhari fails to curtail the countryside’s ravage by the city.

The city unfurls as a plague, its sensuality both morbid and commercial. It’s hidden graces unclad, like the proverbial harlot self-exiled from the village but always returning under the cover of night to stalk and prey the countryside.

Cities do little for the countryside. Knowing this, Buhari announced his decision to resurrect the country by endowing its peasant, agricultural economy with remarkable fillips. He proceeded to do this, forgetting that his team and tools, like Thel’s worms, are corrupt pathogen miming his change mantra.

Buhari must understand that his government cannot achieve agricultural boon simply by pronouncing passion to resources. He must thoroughly examine if resources are pronounced to his passion.

Agreed, the picture was grim pre-Buhari. At his arrival, he boosted productivity via such schemes as the PFI by which he supplied farmers with discounted fertilisers. At his intervention, fertilisers became available to farmers at ?5,500 per bag, a significant cut from the ?9,000 per bag initial regime. And to provide peasant farmers access to credit, the ABP was established. Between 2015 and 2018, ?174 billion was reportedly disbursed to about one million farmers. The total repayment as at the end of 2018 stood at ?21 billion. No thanks to corruption.

To truly improve the fortunes of the agricultural sector, government must eliminate the structural impediments of unreliable power supply, dilapidated irrigation systems, overcrowded ports, and poor roads. For example, it takes an average of six to eight days to move a truckload of tomatoes along the country’s main transport corridor, from Jibiya in the far north to Lagos in the southwest. Unless the cargo is refrigerated—and invariably it is not—it will perish before reaching Lagos port.

There are hopes, however, that the ongoing rail transportation venture would eliminate the challenges associated with transportation.

At the moment, poverty has risen in Nigeria with almost 82.9 million people living on less than one United States dollar per day, according to a National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) May 2020 report. The figure represents 40.09 percent of the total population, excluding insurgency-ravaged Borno, and the bureau predicted that this rising trend is likely to continue.

According to the report, 52.10 per cent of rural dwellers are living in poverty while the poverty rate in urban centres is 18.04 per cent. But going by the UN’s definition of extreme poverty as a condition characterised by severe deprivation of basic human needs, including food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education, and information, 82.9 million is a highly conservative estimate.

It was hay, however, that allowed populations to grow and civilizations to flourish among the forests of Northern Europe. Hay moved the greatness of Rome to Paris and London, and later to Berlin and Moscow and New York, writes Dyson.

Hay was responsible for Nigeria’s first brush with economic glory. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) estimates that between 1962 and 1968, Nigeria’s major foreign exchange earner was the agricultural sector. Palm oil and groundnut made up around 47% of the country’s exports. However, Nigeria’s position as an agricultural powerhouse declined through its oil boom.

Understandably, President Muhammadu Buhari sought to revivify the country’s agricultural economy at his assumption of office in 2015, and then, 2019.

Despite Buhari’s rural preachment, the country’s fixation with oil renders her a whited sepulchre sullied by wastefulness and vice, the soot that will not out.

Nigeria needs agriculture, and there are good reasons for the administration to focus on agriculture. Agriculture employs about 70 percent of the population thus it can be used to drive sustainable growth prospects via a value chain that turns raw commodities into processed goods for domestic consumption or export.

The government must seize the moment to fund diversification of agriculture to make it more appealing to a vast youth population that is spiritless about farming but might be attracted to processing, marketing, and other business opportunities along the value chain.

The food emergency in northeast Nigeria brought on by the Boko Haram insurgency, infrastructure deficits, and COVID-19, and the government’s response to them emphasises the need to expand the agricultural sector to guarantee food security and nutrition.

But while the rationale for prioritizing agriculture is sound, many reforms will have to be enacted if the sector is to flourish. These reforms must also include measures to save rural Nigeria by the sheen continually sponged off its greenery by the city.

In his literary classic, The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin, Russian novelist, Vladimir Voinovich, intones:

‘I wonder what they teach them in the city.’

‘That’s easy,’ announced Chonkin, “To live off the fat of the countryside.”