Minister of Agric, Chief Audu Ogbeh, Prof. I. U Abubakar. Ex. Director IAR& Prof. C. A. M Lakpini, Ex. Director, NAPRI |
Ahmadu Bello University has
been always home since I left more than 46 years ago. I was in Usman Dan-Fodio
hall in 1969, went to Dakar to do a year abroad in 1970, came back to round up
in 1972 with teaching at the Institute of education for a while, went for my
master degree, and came back 1977 to leave for Makurdi as the head, department
of languages at the college of Art and Science before I wondered off to this
very tricky business of politics. So it is real joy for me to be here.
I cannot
thank you enough for your reception, even before then, you have visited last
week when i promised to come here this week. I am supposed to have been here
before now as I have severally made promises to come. I am sad a bit because I
should have started here; having known what has gone wrong here for so many
years. Thank you for your reception and staying faithful to your calling as an
establishment for all you have done for agricultural impacts. Let me apologize
on behalf of the political class whether military or civilian for abandoning
agriculture for nearly 30 years.
The problem we are facing today would never
have been. We should never have become a nation of importers. How many pound of
rice we are bringing in at a time the import bill for rice was five million dollar
per day. At a time we have very brilliant philosophy of Structural Adjustment
which is all about importation and importation at the cost of 18 billion dollar
per annual. Tooth pick, sugar, milk, tomato paste, honey, ice cream powder,
cookies and biscuit, and chicken. Everything we are importing with a ship load
until we are broke, and today the present administration is to be blamed for
everything we have done in the past. Let me correct one thing here today,
nobody can correct a mistake of 30 years in 2yrs. We are happy as we are making
progress in agriculture to restore Nigeria back. We cannot do so without you.
From the presentations i have seen, am seriously encouraged especially because
I am going to need more help from you now than before.
First, our extension
services is almost collapse since the end of ADPs World Bank assisted
programme. Today we have little or no extension services at the states. As a
result we have no capacity to teach our farmers on how to plant essential crops
like maize using the best agricultural practices of spacing as being done in
other advanced countries like Spain where corn and maize are given 6 inches
space apart. Here you see maize being planted in a metre apart and the quality
of our seeds is so low that it cannot give more than two tons per hectare. We
need your help. We are going into Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with your
extension and research services to work for us in the next few years.
We have
ambitious program to work with all extension offices in the local government
across the nation, we intend to achieve that in a year or two. But you will
have to help us, as we will look for the fund that will give you means to train
the youths in their local languages that will be transferred to training the
rural farmers in their different localities on the best agronomics on how to
plant, how to harvest, how to dry and all that will be necessary so as to be
able to meet the global standard in crop production. We will engage you
formally as soon as the resources we are waiting for are formally available. I
have heard and seen your presentation, and one topical problem we have today is
that of farmers and herdsmen. If we don’t deal with it quickly, we run the risk
of damaging the harmony and co-existence of Nigeria as a country.
Prof. Ibrahim Garba |
The killings
are getting too many and in an attempt to solve the problem, we have proffered
certain solutions. But perhaps we are not sensitive enough to Nigerians fragile
sensitivity and suspicious. When we spoke of colonies, we are immediately
greeted with reactions as if it was an attempt to siege Nigeria land, and give
it to the Fulanis to colonize. Nothing can be far from the truth. The intension
is not for Fulani’s or anyone to colonize any territory. It is to provide a
level for cattle to graze in peace under control environment so as to prevent
the constant conflict between the farmers and the herdsmen. If there are any
suspicions, it is regrettable; we do not intend to seize anybody’s land by
force. And to make the point very clear, early last year, we wrote letters to
states government asking how many of them are interest in the program.
A large
number of them replied while some did not, as some said they have no land to
give. But sixteen of them said they were interested in such program. Some did
not reply, and some said they had no land to lease, but sixteen of them are
willing to surrender as much as five hectares in their states. So government
will not force any state to surrender land, will not force any state to do what
she does not want to do because the land is under the supervision of the state
government. But those who have agreed to give land will work together with us
to create a new culture of cattle rearing that is different from what we have
today.
We are told it is a culture for herdsmen to be moving animals around,
but between you and i as an academics and scientists, we all know the current
culture of open grazing is creating a very serious challenge and not too
efficient. First it does not allow us to harvest milk, second the yield of our
milk is one of the lowest in the world. Less than a litre per day is not what a
cow produce per day, and it can give more. Third, the cows are not well fed and
fourthly, cows really don’t like to walk round except we made them and what they
are going through is like a torture to the animals. They want to be well fed,
good water to drink and good veterinary services as a living animal.
If we can
create a new environment for cattle, give them what they need and protect them
against rustlers, the herdsmen will do more better than what they are doing now
by making far more money than what they are doing now. So we need folders, we
need grazing areas; we need water and protection. And you can help us provide
them, so please standby because only yesterday, a committee was set up by the
Vice President with six members that are state governors discussing the way to
resolving the challenge as states that are interested will begin work on the
matter as soon as possible within one week. We will engage you to participate,
to help us in developing folders and settling these cattle as quickly as
possible to reduce this tension.
One problem we are facing is that not all the
cattle are indigenous to Nigeria. Some of them walk in from other countries.
Only last Friday, there was crisis in Ghana. A court gave a ruling that
herdsmen should vacate a land. The herdsmen refused and the army and policemen
came to evacuate the cattle, and two soldiers were shot and killed by the
herdsmen in the process. Of course the army was moved in as they killed about
200 cows, only God knows how many herdsmen they shot. A week earlier, it
happened in Ivory Coast and also last year in the country, about 37 persons
were killed in similar circumstances. So it is indeed a regional crisis that we
need to solve. If we succeed in improving breeding cattle here, then the rest
of West Africa will learn from us. Kenya had the same problem as far as 1942
and China the same in the past. What they did is what we are asking you to help
us do as soon as possible. We will provide the resources for you to be able to
move into the site on contract, just as you will be able to earn some money for
your Institute. This is because there is nothing foreigner can do which you
cannot do. You know the climate and very familiar with many other challenges
relating to livestock than any one. So stand by and get ready for work because
the result for hard work is always more work. For those of you in these
institutes, and in this centre that have done so much, we will give you more
work to do.
There are many things you are doing here that is going to earn us
more work and money to create job for the youths and solve the crisis of
poverty in Nigeria. Somebody spoke about goat; there is a demand for goat meat
in the Middle East to the tune of 120,000 tons carcasses per week. Can we produce? Also we need milk, and a
billion dollar is annually spent to import milk and its products. If we
stabilized the cattle productivity with milk extraction and processing to meet
the international standard, then we can be talking of meeting our local demand.
We talked of bio gas that can be produced from the waste of cattle and I am
already doing that in my farm at Kuje, Abuja. We run a 7KV generator with
chicken waste to produce the bio gas. Talking about your machine that has been
vandalized thereby hindering the milk preservation; we will need to find out
what is wrong with it so as to able to fix it as quickly as possible.
Talking
about empowerment of the youths, which is one of the most dangerous problems
facing Nigeria today. About 16 years ago in Kaduna, I gave a warning in a
lecture titled “North and the future of Nigeria” that there will be violence
wearing the face of religion. People said I was duly being academic. I said that
the violence is going to come from anger, alienation and hopeless among the
youths and it was going to be violent on a scale we have never seen. Few people
saw my point, but the majority said I was being unduly intellectual, but what
we have now is Boko Haram, and we don’t want another one. Right now the degree
of kidnapping and armed robbery in the North being engineered by the young
Northerners who say managing business
the way their parents did is not a better business when compared to kidnap of
people.
This is a threat to our existence as it is increasing violence and
unemployment coupled lack of hope among our youths. So wrap up your program for
youth training, as you will receive many more of them. Youths do not need to
have university degree before they can earn a living anymore. We can train them
to be useful to start earning for a living and have more fame.
One wonderful
thing about agriculture is that it sobers the human character and gives mind
discipline because it ties one down to lecture. I grow up following my father
to the farm from age five, and I have never forgotten agriculture as a farmer.
I do a bit of poultry, I have hatchery that does a million day old chick per
week. I keep some cattle, and the only processor of castor oil factory in the
whole of continent of Africa. This is why we will like to engage you in helping
us to improve on the seeds of castor in Nigeria because its oil yield is a bit
low.
We have capacity of 15,000 tons of seeds per annual, and we are not
getting enough seeds towards our intension target to engage 15,000 farmers on
one hectare each to give us castor seed to produce castor oil that will be sold
to the power companies that are making transformers. It is a good business. We
also produce cashew nut and we have just returned from Vietnam, the largest
processor of cashew nut in the world. Africa produces the raw nuts and exports
them to Vietnam as she is making 3.4 billion dollar per annual being only a
quarter of what we could have earned if we had been roasting the cashew by
ourselves.
But as we go forward, there
is a lot of what you need to do for us. We need to export more, and we are
already doing well as Nigerian export is up with 55% in the last one year. Tin
can Island has recorded increase of 150% in agro export in the last one year.
We have reduced rice importation by 95% in the last one year. But we still have
work to do as Chika Brown chicken of National Animal Production Research
Institute (NAPRI) must be brought alive, a very drought resistant product and
we need to know what you need to get you back on track. Some mention hibiscus
flower called “sobo”as about 35 million dollar worth of it was exported to
Mexico, but we need to improve on the quality and its drying.
I will charge you
here to come up with dryer made with
stainless steel to double production and export because I saw sobo extraction
in Vietnam being converted to tea just as the demand for Shea butter, banana
and coconut are very high. Also pawpaw and pineapple demand are high with
cocoa. But we noticed cocoa production position of Nigeria has dropped to
number seven in the list of producing nation. This is an embracement. I am
hearing and excited about your micro finance bank. Your 100% loan recovery
excited me. Please do me a summary report of what you have done for onward
presentation to Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) for a demand.
Actually the
Governor was in my office two days ago and we discussed about how credit would
be given to farmers at a single digit rate of five percent on agriculture. The
CBN see it logical because worldwide, it is only in Nigeria that interest rate
is 9, 11, 25, 31% etc, otherwise averagely it is not more than 3.5% worldwide.
We cannot do it differently and hope to get a better result. So if I had summary of what you need, I shall lobby for
your access to fund so as to be able to give more loans to farmers for
production and repayment in six months.
Let me round up by
congratulating you for what you have all done so far, your threshers, dryer ,
harvesters are going to be needed in larger quantity because when the cattle
are now put together in ranches, colonies or center, we will need to harvest
all our agro waste and process them. I was in India two months ago, there was a
book written by an Indian Doctor called “ I too have a dream” by Dr. Kuria who
used rice stalks as basic feed for cattle. He used these machines to cut down
the stalks be it maize, millet and even cassava leaves. He was the father of
India milk revolution. We cannot afford to keep importing because we have no
money again. We need to cut down and increase local production. By importing we
are exporting our dollars by bring in goods along with poverty, unemployment
and hunger. Champaign and red wine are not our priority now. If they were, then
we should produce them here. Our priority is food, machineries, medicines and
intellectual property. But as long as we are hungry and angry, none of these
things are achievable. So I am very proud of you because you are already
dealing with issues that touch our lives while my advice for you is to try
harder as we really regret what happened last year about the budget.
The budget
was signed on the 12th of June, procurement made six pieces of
adverts, two months of tender and we started receiving money November. So you
had nothing to repair your machines, but we hope it does not happen this year.
The procurement law caused the delay in the release of fund last year and that
was while you cannot get fund early enough to get many of machines repaired. We
hope it will not happen again this year as the Senate has promised to finish
the budget by the end of March.
We hope so because when such delay happens, we
cannot do anything. But some of these reforms have tended to deform growth in
Nigeria. This kind of reform has ruined education in Nigeria. For example we
cancelled primary school teachers’ training school and wondered into all kinds
of reforms. But today a secondary school leaver cannot write a letter because
the foundation from the primary school has been totally destroyed. How can you
teach if you were not trained? Teachers’ training colleges were abolished and
this has affected our development and growth including your research
institutes.
We could not vote money to you because we have no access to the
money and the whole year passed without anything, and agriculture is seasonal.
If what you must do in January is not done, you cannot catch up with it. So we
apologize as we are finding ways to improve on this. Let me round up by asking
if your extension services can help us out in training extension officers to
spread out across the country. Let me also see how we can help you by funding
your radio and television programme to reach out to more farmers. I cannot make
any concrete promises now, but I will tell you that something would be sourced.
Let me thank you for receiving us. Like I said the most powerful legislator in
the world is stomach. And if our population is getting to 450 million in 2050,
which is over 25% of humanity, then if we cannot eat well, then welcome to
Armageddon. May God forbid.
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