‘Chief Audu Ogbeh should please tender his letter of resignation and leave the office immediately and let’s have an active minister or the President take over immediately’

Mr Shedrack Madlion

Mr Shedrack Madlion is chief executive of Admiral Environmental Care Limited, Kaduna. Here, in this exclusive interview with Food Farm News conducted via telephone, he expressed disappointment in the  whole agriculture system, especially with the recent rejection of Nigerian yam in United Kingdom. Excerpts…

I am recording you live, I am Ayeni, can you introduce yourself?

My name is Shedrack Madlion, the executive Director of Admiral Environmental Care, a workshop agricultural centres in Kaduna.

What is your assessment of this administration’s agricultural development efforts in the last two years?

The performance is very low, what we expected is not what we are seeing as we had high aspiration that this government had come to deliver especially poor Nigerians out of poverty. We thought this government was going to revive the real sector and take Nigeria out of quagmire of focusing on oil sector with developing of agriculture. In two years of this administration, so much have been said, and what is on ground cannot justify it saying. The silos are empty, there are insecurity in the farms rural areas which has undermine the participation of farmers. The herdsmen-farmers’ clashes has thrown hardship into communities, as over 14 villages have been wiped out in Agatu in Benue state. There are clashes in many other villages across the country in southern Kaduna between herdsmen and farmers. The grazing reserve has been taken over by other human activities and ecological problems. The worst of it all is when we expected the President to take over the ministership and look at the agriculture desk because it is only when a nation is well fed that nation becomes a wealthy nation. Rather, he wanted to be the minister of NNPC, where one of the biggest fraud is assumed to be taking place. Whereas, in realty, the biggest corruption is taking place in agriculture, where incompetency is the order of the day.

You say agriculture is where highest level of fraud take place, can you point to one or two that one can easily spot?

Yes, what I am talking about incompetency here is the Anchor Borrower Programme that is highly celebrated, highly shouted to have been successful but which is a failure. Anchor Borrower Programme, what was disbursed compared to what was harvested was not in tandem. Our local rice today is still more expensive than the imported rice. There is no co-relationship between mechanization to increase productivity in our farms here. 

We just keep on talking about Lagos- Kebbi relationship. Has it dropped the price of rice in the market. A president of a country is jailed for five years in absentia because of the mismanagement of rice subsidy. I am talking about Thailand. Nigeria needs 7.5 million metric tons of rice; we have not yet reached that threshold of two million metric tons. And yet we keep telling ourselves, we are doing very well, we are doing very well, even when smuggled foreign rice is much cheaper than the locally produced rice. You cannot compete in rice production with hoe and cutlass. 

The whole country put together does not have four thousand tractors put together. And then we lied to ourselves that the numbers of people that went to Hajj, and went to Pilgrimage are farmers, which is not true. Is pilgrimage a yard stick to identify success in a community where people could not eat three square meals? Is travelling to Israel or Saudi Arabia, a requirement to richness when most family today do not have three square meals? It is so sad that a nation will play politics with an economy so vital like the agricultural sector. One is so disappointed. I don’t need a president who will win the next election, but I need a president who will be able to win the next generation and that is where I belong to.

Okay, a while ago, you said that the Minister of Agric should resign...?

Yes, he should tender his resignation. If I were him as a honorable man I know him to be, he should tender his resignation and walkout of the office. He has caused us more national embarrassment. He has brought us more hardship than bringing food to the tables of Nigerians. As I am talking to you Nigeria will be looking for 14,000 pounds to dispose of the yams that got rotten in London. You celebrated the export of our yams without looking for the legality of it. Yam is one of the prohibited items you cannot take out of the shores of this country. Cassava is one of them, wheat is one of them. Until the 1999 constitution is amended you cannot export it. After the amendment, you will now bring a technical team that you will be able to see you are not going to embarrass the country over there. Over 200 million people do not have sufficient yam to eat in Nigeria but it is only 4 or 3 states that are responsible for the production yam in Nigeria. The states are Niger state, Nassarawa state, Taraba state and Benue state. The rest states depend on the states were yam is as consumed as much as rice. 35 million metric tons of yam is what the country needs for consumption. The average age of cultivators are between ages 60 to 75.  It is a tedious crop to grow and there are no mechanization application to yam production in Nigeria.

Please give more clarification on prohibited items of crops.

You can’t take them out raw

Is it by our constitution or by which constitution?

By the 1999 constitution, it is clearly stated there. Go to the Custom Act and see list of items prohibited to take out. It shows that even the legal units in the Ministry of Agriculture are sleeping. The export promotion council does not know its job. Technically, yams are not allowed to be in transit for more than 15 days. Yams don’t go by ship, yams don’t go by containers. Yams go by air. The maximum shelve life of yam in transit is 15days. Anything beyond 15days, going to 70days days, and also, leaving the tropical region to temperate region you will lose the yams. All the yam shown on the television being packed into the containers were already rotten. Africans prefer Ghanaian yam to Nigerian yam, based on quality.

Who are supposed to certify the quality of those yams before they are exported? Don’t they check at the quality of those yams before they are exported? We watch TV shows rather than to put food on Nigerians table. Chief Audu Ogbeh should please tender his letter of resignation and leave the office immediately and let’s have an active minister or the President take over immediately. Until we start holding people responsible for consequences, things will not work.