A not-so-veiled message from the Captain and Vice Captain, at two high-profile events, and the jeremiads from some of the crew members have all but vanished.
“Some of us are confused about whether to abuse the past or the present; or to make excuse for the future,” President Bola Tinubu observed in Minna, while flagging off the Niger State food security and agricultural mechanization programme, complete with adequate ranching for herders. “But that is not in my dictionary.”
Vice President Kashim Shettima, at the public presentation of Sam Omatseye’s book, Beating All Odds: Diaries and Essays on How Bola Tinubu Became President: “Yes, we are having challenges. And we are not here to apportion blame. Leadership,” he stressed, “is about accepting responsibility and finding solutions to national challenges.”
And voila! The anti-Muhammadu Buhari-era growling, fast becoming a sickening pastime among some Tinubu administration hierarchs, has all but vanished!
That’s highly welcome. Lamentation is nothing but emotional paralysis. Paralysis never solves a problem. Rather, It creates more. But hard, punishing thinking does.
Incidentally, the same period (of more gruelling thinking, less sweet grumbling) has somewhat chalked up relief from the Naira front — with the Naira highly appreciating, even if it’s still far too low, in parity to the dollar, given the strength of the Nigerian economy, relative to other African countries, anyway.
“Lagos is Nigeria’s richest state, producing about US$ 90 billion a year in goods and services,” The Economist once gushed, “making its economy bigger than that of most African countries, including Ghana and Kenya.”
Yet, Lagos is only a pie — a major pie, to be sure — from the Nigerian economy. So, why would the Naira crumble more against the dollar, than the Ghana Cedi; or the Francophone West Africa CFAS; or the Kenyan Shilling?
Also, potential glad tidings from the oil refining front. With both the NNPC Ltd’s Port Harcourt Refinery and the Dangote facility set to push out wet products, news of a possible fall in pump prices of petroleum products is making the rounds.
It’s, therefore, welcome to the brass tacks, after an impassioned bout of sweet lamentations and self-distractions. It’s nice to start thinking development again!
As the President and Vice President have rightly insisted, the Tinubu government was voted in to raise PMB-era achievements a higher notch, while also fixing that era’s drawbacks — without prejudice to investigating, prosecuting and securing conviction for any alleged crimes, by any member of the ancien regime.
But tackling alleged regime felons is one thing. Sweeping, omnibus tarring of the old order is another — particularly when both old and new are products of the same APC; and PMB’s scorecard also helped in getting President Tinubu elected, though, to be fair, the president’s campaign pushed out clear plans to further improve things.
Besides, in partisan strategic tracking, which is smarter? Intra-APC regime bickering? Or a neat, tidy contrast between what PDP did in 16 years, against APC’s own records, across sectors in eight, going to nine years?
But even beyond partisan manouevers: wouldn’t such tidy categorization correctly track progress, stagnation and retrogress, and mirror a more definite status of things, than the customary penchant to feast on rot, wilfully deny credible achievements and proclaim doom, in a never-ending fit of avid self-loathing?
Nothing epitomizes such positive continuity, not to mention an admirable re-focus, more than Niger State’s audacious agricultural plan, which President Tinubu flagged off on March 11.
That may be a state programme, as distinct from a Federal Government’s. But in it sits sound synergy that speaks to the Federal Government staying true on the critical theme of food security, driven by agricultural processing, if PMB’s agricultural activism must be built upon.
That the president himself was there to buy into the project was a huge symbolism in Federal-state collaboration; and state-state economic partnership, to deepen the real sector using, as lynchpin, the various segments of agriculture.
The promise of Niger!
The project, dubbed Total Agricultural Support Programme (TASP), in concert with Campo Company of Brazil, already has, in ready investments, 500 large capacity tractors, 50 harvesters of sundry grades, 200 power tillers and 1, 000 agricultural and irrigation equipment of varying types.
Irrigation speaks to all-year, all-round farming, to maximize Nigeria’s traditional two farming seasons. The dam component speaks to power security, via hydro-powered electricity, so imperative for agricultural processing — by cottage industries linked to farms, providing job opportunities for the rural youth.
“We are bringing about 140 kilometres of water irrigation to this place from Shiroro Dam,” Governor Bago told a visiting Nigerian Union of Journalists (NUJ) delegation. “We are bringing 80 megawatts of power to the Airport City Project.”
The “shop window”, for this extensive crop/animal husbandry processing mart, is an “Airport City Free Zone” — a free trade zone, projected to be the biggest of its type in Africa when in full bloom — processing diary products, vegetables and fruits; and moving such products abroad, or to other Nigerian states, as per appropriate orders, thus further deepening the real sector, creating fresh jobs along the value chain.
But as the Niger government thinks processed crops, meat and dairy, the Federal Transport ministry should think rail link and penetration to further tackle food inflation.
Again, pushing out diary products, with the level of mechanized investments in TASP, suggests a much more embedded livestock-processing industry, much deeper and far more sophisticated than herding from one spot to another. That itself suggests a well thought out ranching policy, as an integral part of TASP.
Visiting President Tinubu also gushed over restructuring the agricultural ecosystem, with happy farmers and settled herders, driving their trade in peace.
“I know what it means for roaming cows to eat crops and the vegetation of our land. I know it’s painful,” the president admitted. “But when we reorient the herder and make provision for cattle rearing (reading ranching) we can address that. You are the governors who are to provide the land. I, as President,” he pledged, “am committed to providing a comprehensive programme that will solve this problem.”
Besides, no less than four states — Benue, Kogi, Kwara and Lagos — have plugged into TASP, with memoranda of understanding. Lagos, for once, needs a lot of paddy rice to feed its massive rice mill in Imota, via Ikorodu (the biggest in West Africa), send the price of rice crashing in its markets and give inflation a bloody nose.
It exciting that Niger State, which boasts the largest land mass in Nigeria — 76, 363 square kilometres — is pressing its vast land resource into serious economic use.
The riveting promise of Minna is the glimmer of hope for inter-state agricultural collaboration for the good of all.
Let everyone plug into it. It might well be the latest step to ensuring food security.
