Bolaji Akinboro |
My name is Bolaji
Akinboro, CEO, Cellulant Nigeria, and Chief of Party for the electronic wallet
scheme. This is my understanding of where we are as today. The current
government has promised to continue with any good policy for the development of
agricultural sector.
There has been an usual situation that happened in 2015 in
which crude oil price prices suddenly collapsed thereby making government not
to be able to meet in obligation. As a result many things could not be done
like inputs for raining season. But my understanding of the strategy to
mitigate this is by expanding this year dry season planting to more farmers.
The
plan is that there will be an expanded dry season planting that will be made to
target as high as three million farmers and this will be used to recoup
whatever things we may have lost in terms of the Growth Enhancement Support
(GES) in 2015 raining planting season. And rice is a crop of our food
consumption, if we have 2 million to 2.5 million farmers doing rice at the dry
season, at the average of five tons per hectare as each of them will do 1-2
hectares.
What this will translate is almost about 25 million tons of rice paddies
and this will help a lot because right now Nigeria currency is every day
getting devalued. So a large dry season planting will do us well to checkmate
food imports and my understanding of President Muhammadu Buhari is that he is
ready to any good policy for food security.
What is your take about some states that
purchase fertilizer inputs without following GES process?
I know some states
tried to go back to old system, but farmers themselves protested in some of the
states which I will not like to mention. They are protesting against going back
to the old system because of the way GES worked for them in getting seeds and
fertilizer inputs at a subsidized rates.
The GES is a partnership model between
the FG, States government and farmers, and there is no state government that
can singularly support farmers without the Federal Government through the GES
which is a very transparent process of payment to who pays and who collects.
When you look at the subvention the state governments are getting, it is not enough
to support the majority of farmers in the state.
So whether we like it or not
the GES concept is there, and it is the best system in agricultural input
distribution because it shares the concept well across everybody. And one thing
that the FG wants to do is to improve upon the GES for next level of Nigeria
Agricultural Payment Initiative (NARI).
What Government is saying now is that
we have experienced GES for three years, let us go back and do revalidation of
all the farmers we have registered in the data base. But this time around, we
will capture their bio metrics and each farmer will have a unique identity card
he can use for GES production. And with this ID, the farmers can easily be
clustered into cooperative in such a way that if a farmer wants to borrow, we
can connect the farmers to banks as government is only supporting with two bags
of fertilizer which may not meet the six bags required as the case maybe. But
they can now get banks’ borrowing to complete the rest needed fertilizer bags.
The way I am seeing things from the body language of President Mohammudu
Buhari, Nigerian farmers will continue to enjoy more of government’ support as
the approval to NAPI will enhance the dry season production of 2015 and also
solve problem of farmers not being able to borrow money from the banks. We are
supposed to have started NAPI is about 12 states and we will be starting with
dry season farming in Zamfara, Kano, Bauchi, etc. and those states that do
large scale of agricultural produce in dry season.
We are going to 5-7 million
farmers over a specific period starting from November. And while this dry
season programme is going on, we will roll over to other states in the country.
This is one of the agenda of the present FG. President Buhari’s body language
and signer through the meeting with PS of the Agriculture is that I am behind
the programme and I want to continue with the programme. So there is high level
of continuity as expressed by President Buhari to the Permanent Secretary of
the FMARD in the various meeting they have held. There is high expectation for
continuity of programme that is good which GES is one of them.
What are the areas of your regrets in the
GES as regards your role?
Okay, the only area
of regret that I have is the fact that Government has now acquired a lot of
information technologies to ensure GES and now NAPI, how I wish that government
has invested more in getting more young information technologists to support
the programme because ultimately we are going extra miles to support the
programme.
But if government could employ younger knowledable people in this
area by being able to do what we are doing, I am of the view it will help the
development of the nation faster even at Cellulant departure. The support of
government to empower people who can do what we are doing will help the system
a lot.
My own personal wish is that more young people like me working in the
government system who has technology knowledge that can reduce the 100%
pressure of what cellulant is doing as what we are doing is to provide support
for government and that is why I wish more young people with technology driven
knowledge can think of working with Nigeria government for the purpose of the
development of our dear nation. From what I have seen, Government really needs
a lot of technology talented young people to work with, and this is the only
area of challenge and regret I have.
In most of the other countries I have
worked and some of the countries that seem more organized than ours is because
of the strength of the civil service. A good country needs a very strong civil
service, and I think that we should try as much as to achieve more in this area
to ensure strengthening the civil service. This is important because when
Cellulant goes there should be competent people in the system that will be able
to continue.
The good thing is that we have been able to transfer some
information technologies responsibility to Government because the GES system is
like seven core systems with about other sub systems. As we have already
transferred two, meaning about 14 sub systems, and out of the remaining five,
we have started working with about another three as our goal is targeting next
year when government would have been able to handle six out of the seven.
We do
not want to stay inside government permanently forever; we have to build more
capacity for people inside the system who can run with it so that we can continue
with other work. Cellulant is different from many others who want government to
be a slave as we believe that Government should be strong institution for
efficient performance of her obligation for the citizens. We help government to
be strong as when she strong, the economy will get boosted, and when this
happens, there will be opportunity for everybody in terms of jobs. That is my
take as Bolaji.
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