For want of a kinder description, one has elected to find solace in Trump-speak here. Of course we all know Donald Trump don’t we? The brash, swashbuckling presidential candidate of the Republican Party, his reputation and the sheer prospect that he might just end up in the White House continues to confound the world.
But because even the devil has his day, let us borrow something from Trump to illustrate our point today. In the early days of his party’s primary election campaign, Trump had literally ‘slayed’ one of the prospective candidates, Jeb Bush, damaging his campaign mortally.
He of the Bush dynasty that had produced two American presidents already, Trump had described Jeb as “a ‘low energy’ candidate who does not have the will to win the presidency.” Poor Jeb, a much younger man, lived under the rubbles of that verbal shelling until it became futile for him to continue in the race.
Now, for want of a more polite description, one would take some liberty here to describe Agriculture Minister Audu Ogbeh’s recently released Agriculture Promotion Policy (2016 – 2020) as a ‘low energy’ document. The strategy document is nearly at variance with the realities of today.
Though Chief Audu Ogbeh, a renowned farmer heads the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (FMARD), the job of producing this document was obviously farmed out to consultants who simply made a ‘job’ of it as they are wont.
And it’s difficult to love consultants. You know what they say about them: about borrowing your watch, telling you the time with much flourish handing you a fat bill? It must be the same scenario at the Presidency where ‘professional economic consultants’ have just concluded that the best way forward for the ailing economy is to grant the president emergency powers.
By omission or commission, they seek to return Nigeria to dictatorship through the back door. How presidential emergency powers would translate to Nigeria earning more foreign exchange or drastically reduce her staple food imports has not been explained. But this is story for another day.
APP 2016 – 2020 is frustratingly long on wooly prognosis and tragically short on solutions. For a PhD dissertation on Nigeria’s agriculture, it would probably earn an ‘A’ but for strategy a document take Nigeria from her current morass of food crisis and acute foreign currency shortage to sustainability, it is an ‘F’.
What is wrong with APP 2016 – 2020?
First, there is no urgency about it at all and Nigeria is in an emergency of sort: we need to stop food importation immediately; we need to earn foreign exchange. Last month before the Senate, Central Bank of Nigeria’s Governor, Godwin Emefiele, had lamented that forex demands for the importation of rice alone stood at $14 billion.
Today in Nigeria, our basic salary cannot buy a bag of rice and finally, if rice import is banned outright today, an implosion may ensue in the polity almost immediately. All of this suggests a situation that is urgent and critical. It is the same situation for chicken and poultry products, milk and dairy products among others.
In the light of this, one would expect an agric policy that is in line with these realities and that can galvanise the expedited production of these commodities.
What must be done now While this document may be beneficial in the medium to long terms, there are a few things that must be done immediately:
One: need for task forces on rice production value chain, poultry production value chain, dairy production value chain and fish production value chain, for a start.
Task force on rice production value chain (call it a presidential task force if you like, I don’t think we need any emergency powers to do this). This team will monitor, support and coordinate all rice production, processing and marketing activities all around the country regardless of the ownership. It will ensure that critical presidential and institutional support and intervention reach the fields and the mills and even the silos and warehouses real time.
They will work on the entire ramification of the rice value chain. Quarterly report is presented to a presidential committee headed by the president or his deputy. The task force itself is reviewed each year for a maximum period of three years. This way, we can achieve self sufficiency in rice production in two years flat.
The task forces on poultry production, dairy production and fish production will work in nearly the same fashion. In two to three years, Nigeria can achieve self-sufficiency in rice, poultry, dairy and even fish production. The ultimate objective is to conserve ample foreign exchange by ending importation of these products.
Other task forces on areas, such as agro-cooperatives and on reduction of harvest wastages may be looked into. Again because of the versatility and wide acceptance of such crops as cassava, maize, yam and millet, there may be a need to pay a special attention to their planting, harvest, processing and preservation.
FMARD would continue to implement the APP in the medium and long term and to develop a system that would eventually meet and take over from the task forces at a juncture. Of course export cash crops would be among its major prerogative. Is it not criminal that some factories in Nigeria still import palm oil and raw rubber sap is taken out of Nigeria to Ghana to produce vehicle tyres that are shipped back here at exorbitant rates?
What are the urgent actions required for post-harvest wastages in such fruits and crops like water melon, mangoes, oranges, tomatoes, yam and potatoes? The situation is urgent!
In other words, APP 2016 – 2020 lacks the requisite adrenalin to attend to our immediate problems; it’s a ‘low energy’ policy.
Zamfara 8: Low presidential umbrage
Again and again, it happens and all we hear is tepid presidential assurances and nothing is ever done. When 74-year-old Madam Bridget Abahime was butchered in Kano on June 3, the president told us the action was “utterly condemnable” and that justice would be done if we maintained the peace.
When Deaconess Eunice Olawale was slaughtered on July 9, it was the same refrain. Not one person have we seen detained or in the box.
This time eight innocent Nigerians murdered with seven of them roasted right in their home and our president tells us again that ”it is barbaric and the law will take its course.”
Not good enough at all. Where is presidential umbrage which requires that the IGP is summoned and given express orders to pick up all the suspects, put them in handcuffs and parade them the following day? Presidential umbrage would cause the police to expedite prosecution of cases like this to make one or two example of these murderers.
But increasingly, government has shown that it has no interest in deterring some people from cold-blooded killings in the name of Islam. The polity will become a jungle when government pushes the citizenry into having to defend themselves… that is where we are now. Zamfara is one case too many.
