Editorial- The return of GESS as NAGSAP, kudos to Government

It is now very clear that Federal Government (FG) is determined to allow agricultural inputs get to the small scale farmers through an electronic system of registered farmers on an agricultural data base in order to give accountability to whatever is given out so as to checkmate corruption of all sorts.

It is very commendable seeing the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (FMARD) already demanding letter of good conducts from agro input providers as a good development to enhance the effective implementation of the programme. But more still need to done on the part of government officials who are the implementations of the programme as we might want to remind ourselves the initial purpose of the similar program, that is the Growth Enhancement Scheme (GES) that is meant to enhance the development of agro inputs distribution value chain to be able to get much closer to farmers at the rural areas with much less stress to availability and affordability. Also, we may not want to say any further thing on the set back the non implementation of the program after the departure of the former minister, Dr. Adesina Akinwunmi now the present President of AfDB more so that the government has realised the reason why the programme has to be returned in a more better packaged that may have attended to all errors that were observed in the GES. Although, we must not deceive ourselves to say that the program did not confront with challenges at the starting, but all these are things that the committee must looked into and proffer a new course of better delivery of the programme that is now renamed National Agricultural Growth Scheme and Agro Pocket (NAGSAP).

 The states government must be ready to adjust to this process of accountable inputs subsidy thereby replicating FG with accurate data to making inputs available to small scale farmers. Since the formal GES did not make provision for medium and large scale farmers we are not sure whether the new programme will consider these groups this time around just to ensure more robust food security system that will checkmate rising prices of food stuffs occasioned by covid 19 post negative impact. 

The agro inputs providers must not allowed themselves to be used for wrong doings that can possibly derail the programme this time around; we expected them to have learnt a lesson from the former programme on why they should be more faithful for the sustainability of the program, while farmers too must be very faithfully by ensuring that the inputs given to them are cheaply sold back without using the money for crops productions. A very stringent penalty must be put in place for any saboteur of this programme this time around because food security matter must be taken very seriously now in view of growing population and climate change challenges.