ATA is making us relevant in skill impartation: Provost, College of Agriculture & Animal Science. –

Dr Balarabe Mogaji Jahun is the Provost, college of Agriculture and Animal Science who spoke with Seun Ayeni, Food Farm News at his Kaduna office on the role his Institute has played in the Agricultural Transformation Agenda (ATA) of Mr. President where many youths have been given vocational training in agricultural production towards generating self employment. Read the rest of his excerpts.  

Can you introduce yourself sir?

I am Dr. Balarabe Mogaji Jahun , the Provost College of Agriculture & Animal Science.

What is the mandate of your Institution as a College of Agriculture & Animal Science?

The mandate really is to train the middle level manpower in all aspect of agricultural production, which comes in terms of National Diploma, Higher National Diploma, and Certificate Courses in all aspect of Agriculture and Animal Production. With the present Agricultural Transformation Agenda, we are finding ourselves useful in terms of skill acquisition and entrepreneurship training for even those with no formal education in the country. Our staffs are equipped to give training to the learned and non-learned Nigerians. I have come to realize that you cannot learn agriculture but you can practice agriculture even without going to school thereby reducing  poverty, unemployment and insecurity in the country.

Are there Entrepreneurship Programmes ongoing for the students?

Yes, it’s on two fronts, the first one is our own students who are here for certificate training, National Diploma and Higher National Diploma, which are within the school. Before you can get the Diploma or Higher National Diploma in either Animal Health or Animal Production, you are supposed to learn an additional skill, so that you can go out with something to do, you don’t need to wait or search for job, that is one of the things that is recently introduced into the curriculum, so that before our students graduate with a diploma, they are made to learn a trade. Now in addition, occasionally we get people who come from different locations to learn one trade or the other, on agricultural skills. Annually we have collaboration with the Kaduna Refinery and Petro-Chemical company to train some of the jobless people within Kaduna State on Agricultural skill,  basically we have just two  skill training for now, fishery and poultry productions but we are planning to increase and introduce some more skills.

However the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development in collaboration with the Millennium Development Goal in 2013, brought about 300 candidates, students who came to learn different aspect of Animal Production, 100-200 of them came to learn Bull fattening, another 100 came to learn sheep and goat production. The whole idea is to give skill to these unemployed youths, so that we can enter into production properly. Nigeria spends about N11billion annually, to import agricultural produce into the country, as at last year, we don’t know what this year will bring. We also import rice worth N2billion. The truth is Nigeria has the capacity to produce all the products we import, if we can harness ourselves together in production, but the important thing is to encourage small and medium scale enterprises, in the area of production, and also provide the necessary things needed, so that we can put a stop to the importation of Agricultural products we can produce here in Nigeria. 

Imagine if we can save $11billion – $10billion, it will help in developing our economy. So we have more to do and agriculture is the only sector that can absorb 80-90 percent of our unemployed youths, at least we’ve heard what the statistic is, about 170million Nigerians and people have to eat every day and where is the food going to come from? We have the land, the resources and the personnel’s, but what are we doing as a country? We are doing our own bit of helping Nigerians to overcome these challenges through our mandate, thereby improving the lives of Nigerians especially the youths and the women in training them in different skill which is already adding value to the development of our economy.

With the resurfacing of Bird Flu, and the theme of your workshop Bird Flu, how prepared are you. How will this workshop help in combating Bird Flu?

What we are trying to do is to sensitize the farmers to be on alert and prepared for this devastating  disease, and by the grace of God we will not be caught unaware like we did the last time  and that is the motive and the theme for the workshop “ Bird Flu, how prepared are you”. 

We intend to talk about Bio-security measures, what you must do to prevent Bird Flu from entering your farms, its public hazard, and the zoonotic aspect of it, how human get the disease from birds, and we also intend to talk about the economic implication of  Bird Flu. 

This is important because once it enters your farm, it is like losing every bird on your farm, which is a serious economic implications, so what do we do, other than to prevent this devastating disease from entering farms, and doing this means we have to pass the knowledge across to farmers so that they can be prepared and also on alert as we work together to combat and also put a stop to Bird Flu in Nigeria.