How Buhari's Govt Plans to Revive Agriculture in Nigeria

Transporting maize to the market.

Chief Audu Ogbeh, a farmer, is the Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development. In this exclusive interview with Daily Trust on Sunday, he explained why agriculture collapsed in Nigeria and the plans by President Muhammadu Buhari's administration to resuscitate it.

What is your assessment of Nigerian agriculture at the moment?

The thing is as you know now in Nigeria; we are back to where we started off in agriculture many years ago. And sadly enough I want to say, those were better times than now. We made some progress in physical development but philosophically we haven't really advanced, otherwise the Malaysians, Chinese, and the Indians, whatever successes they achieved, they never forgot to invest in agriculture in their various countries.

Go to any home today, virtually everything you see is foreign and when you are talking about food - rice, biscuits, milk, sugar, cookies - are imported into Nigeria. Over the years, I never liked what was going on. Since 1986, I have been a severe critic of the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP). I was in Hong Kong with a friend in 1986 when we phoned home and called the then Head of Service one Abu Obe and he told us that the auctioning of the Naira began that day and it was still N1 to $1. Before then, the Naira use to be a $1.50 and the Naira was almost a pound sterling; and the pressure has been on. They put pressure on Shagari to devalue he refused, they tried General Buhari who succeeded him, he refused. In fact a General from the US army who was his course mate, General Walters, was with Buhari for an hour trying to persuade Buhari to devalue the Naira, but Buhari said no.

Across Africa, they forced our currencies down. And the Chinese, the Indians and the Malaysians rejected SAP. Our economies here most of whom are product of the same institutions were forced to accept that there was no alternative to SAP.

Suddenly, people who were on the farms started leaving. It was better to be a contractor supplying tea, toilet papers, coffee to ministries. They became richer. Some of them owned pick-ups, built houses and suddenly the gap between the elites.

Even cattle rearing, today we haven't done a census -we're going to do one this year - of cattle in this country. The estimate placed them lower than 15million. The rest come from Mali, Senegal, Chad and Cameroon. Some of the violent cattle grazers going round the country are not Nigerian Fulani, which is the mistake they make. The Nigerian Fulani go about grazing peaceful while the violent cross border cattle grazers move around with AK-47. The impact has been multi-dimensional. Our cows give just a litre of milk a day because of the grasses they eat. Brazilian, Argentine and Australian cows have access to grasses with 28% crude protein.