The CEO Cellulant
Nigeria, Mr. Bolaji Akinboro
|
The CEO Cellulant
Nigeria, Mr. Bolaji Akinboro has urged more youths to harness the potential opportunities
in agricultural activities to empower themselves especially in the use of Information
Technology (IT) in giving extension services and inputs to farmers thereby
posing an alternative to older hands in the public and private sector of
agriculture.
Mr. Akinboro in an
interview with Food Farm News in his
office said more youths need to get into changing the agricultural sector
through IT saying their ingenuity will change the face of the sector to more
vibrant economy especially in the face of the dwindling oil in the world market
with more emphasis on repositioning to the real sector of agriculture as
alternative source of revenue generation.
Cellulant Nigeria
is a private company that powered the compilation of farmers’ data used for the
Growth Enhancement Support of the Federal Government’s inputs subsidy to over
fourteen million farmers in the country thereby curbing over 30 years corrupt
practices in the fertilizers in less than 100 days as the product given to end
users can now be well accounted for in terms of what is distributed and taken.
According to
Cellulant CEO “There is compelling evidence of an
aging farmer population in the country, which must be addressed to facilitate
sustainability in agricultural production. Most farmers in Nigeria are
over 55 years and our life-expectancy averages is between 55-60 years and as
the country already relies heavily on food imports to feed its growing
population, reversing the trend will mean that the youth must take up the
mantle and venture into agriculture where there is a lot of potential for the
youths who are IT inclined, but it’s about identifying the right opportunities.
The youths are strategic to the success of any effort to boost Nigerian food
production,”.
Mr. Bolaji also
submitted that Nigerian farmers would soon experience more positive change in terms
of government intervention going by the body language of President Mohammadu
Buhari during his meeting with Permanent Secretary of FMARD added he was
optimistic that the GES programme would be up scaled saying “the President
believes that the continuation of the GES will help curb corruption that is
uppermost in the priority of this present government.
Already many states are beginning
to make orders for fertilizer input thereby trying to go back to old practices
which farmers have decried and it is likely to bring a crack to the federal
government Growth Enhancement Scheme”.
Mr.Bolaji advocated
for the use of modern technology to develop agriculture urging the federal
government to bring in more sophisticated technologies to further fasten the
development of the sector.
No comments:
Post a Comment