FG may use dry season farming to mitigate food shortage-Cellulant boss.

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.