One of the greatest challenges to our country’s general wellbeing,as shown by the recent ill-fated Nigerian Immigration Service’s employment fiasco, is youth unemployment. Many have appropriately described it as a time bomb. Clearly, the greatest tragic consequence of unemployment is hunger. And as the cliché goes, a hungry man is an angry man. In local parlance, we say, man must wak. So, unless something is urgently done about unemployment, especially at the youth level, our country is staring at its own Armageddon. Discussing this national emergency with a friend, who has invested in chicken farming, he lectured me on the immense potentials and challenges of that sector.
According to him, if only the Ministry for Agriculture, the Bank of Industry, the Bank of Agriculture and other key interest groups could put their thinking cap, that sector is enough to dwarf the touted 1.5 million employments that the present federal government claims to have generated. My friend gave a clinical comparison of the chicken value chain in a country like Brazil and compared it with his practical experience in Nigeria. From his analysis, while there is standardization in the production chain of chicken in developed countries, the reverse is the case in Nigeria. He gave a practical example, that while the drum-stick eaten in restaurants across cities of Europe and America are substantially similar, you find different sizes, and of course lower quality, in the ones eaten in Nigeria. He said that the landing cost of an imported chicken parts, is about half of the cost of the locally produced, despite the added cost of transport. He ticked off the extra costs that make local production uncompetitive, and proffered solutions to those challenges.
No doubt, I was impressed with his analysis of the challenges and potentials of an improved chicken value chain, and I told him so. In fact, I told my friend that he has a patriotic responsibility to our country seething in angst of youth unemployment and the nihilistic insurgency, to share his ideas with the Honourable Minister of Agriculture, Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, and possibly other key drivers of the agricultural sector. Well, that is if the Honourable Minister is not already satiated with his well advertised, but truly impressive award as Forbes African Person of the Year? But why should he, considering that President Jonathan’s administration is faced with perhaps the greatest security challenge in the history of our country, since our last unfortunate civil war.
As a matter of fact, there is little doubt that the greatest inducement to the armed challenge that our country is facing in the North Eastern states and increasingly now in the Middle Belt states is poverty. The poverty index in the affected states is abysmally higher than the equally high poverty index in other parts of the country. This critical state of affairs is daily made worse by the exponential youth unemployment, from where the armed bearing militants are easily recruited. And according to the Honourable Minister who has shown impressive excitement in the discharge of his duties, despite criticism from the press, agriculture is the key to the unemployment challenges facing our country, and I add, the Boko Haram insurgency in the North East and the menace of the Fulani herdsmen in the North Central.
The United Nations, World Bank and other multinational development agencies have confirmed inexorably the connection between poverty and insurgency. In a recent interview with this paper, the Bornu state Governor, Kashima Shetima was sport on this connection, when he said: “there is a lot of correlation between the poverty that has engulfed the North Eastern region of Nigeria and the Boko Haram insurgency. Because the World Bank described the Northeast portion of Nigeria, the Republic of Chad, the Republic of Niger, and the Darfur region of Sudan as one of the poorest places on Earth. Hence the emergence of militant organisations like the Janjaweed militia and the Boko Haram in the Northeast. And I believe once we engage the youth, once we create jobs, this madness, this nihilism will evaporate”.
Those who try to play down this connection are merely playing the ostrich. And unless we act very urgently, the entire country may soon be engulfed in an insurrection by the youths, whose patrimony has been criminally wasted by decades of irresponsible leadership. Of course, the quickest and the only realistic way to go, is agriculture. Otherwise we will continue to suffer our country’s peculiar contradictions of national economic growth, without corresponding impact on the populace. Indeed, according to Goldman Sachs, Nigeria ranks amongst the next 11 emerging markets group, even when it also acknowledges that about 100 million of its population is living on less that $1.25 a day. Also, according to the National Bureau of Statistics, 60.9 percent of Nigerians in 2010 were living in absolute poverty, up from 54.7 percent in 2004. This staggering increase in the poor, regrettably amidst ‘plenty’, may explain the unlimited supply of canon fodders to the Boko Haram madness.
Speaking to a Financial Times Publications Limited publication, Dr. Adesina put his enthusiasm in historic perspective thus: “We were not looking at Agriculture through the right lens. We were looking at Agriculture as a development activity, like a social sector, in which you manage poor people in rural areas. But Agriculture is not a social sector. Agriculture is business. Seed is business, fertilizer is business, storage, value added, logistics and transport – it is all about business.” He added that “Agriculture is the future of Nigeria”. After listening to my friend, speak on the potentials of the chicken business and how and why the stakeholders must come together to improve the value chain, I have become an enthusiast.
•This article was first published on March 26, 2013.
