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In recent times, there has been general focus on the economic crises in Nigeria, especially hunger and inflation. Typical of the Nigerian culture, fire-brigade reactions like protest marches, buck passing, demand for wage increment and trading of blames have been going on between different interest groups. Governments at different tiers have also dished out their usual handouts of palliatives, cash grants, free meals, generous promises and appeals for calm on the part of the citizenry. It is sad that none of all these haphazard reactions qualify as a proper solution to the problem of hunger, inflation and economic hardship in the country.
Before the discovery of crude oil in Oloibiri, Bayelsa State in 1956, agriculture was the mainstay of the Nigerian economy. In fact, with about 40 million hectares of arable land, good climate and adequate rainfall, Nigeria has humongous potentials in agriculture. This is moreso as Nigeria’s soil and weather permit the cultivation of an array of cash crops like cocoa, palm trees, rubber, rice, yam, sorghum, cassava, mango, cashew and sweet potato. It was the committed exploitation of these agricultural potentials of Nigeria that sustained the viable economy which Nigeria had between 1914 – 1960. However, it is unfortunate that with the discovery of oil which has continued to generate money without corresponding demand for work, Nigeria lost interest in farm work.
The leadership of the country at that time revelled in the surplus cash accruals from crude oil to the point that one of the former military heads of state of Nigeria was quoted as complaining that the problem of Nigeria was not how to make money, but how to spend her money. That the excess income of that time was never invested in any interest yielding ven- ture is a pointer to the epicurean disposition of that Nigerian head of state. This was the beginning of corruption, wasteful spending and agriculture’s descent to the back seat in Nigeria. That administrative blunder of relegating agriculture to the background has continued to subject Nigeria’s economy to the whims of major players in the West- controlled international oil market. This is the bane of the Nigerian economy even now.
The recent geometric increase in costs of food items has exposed the economic fallacy which held crude oil as more important than food and equally proved the trite fact that Nigeria has great comparative advantages in agriculture. Beyond comparative analysis of prices of crude oil and food items, the utility function of food in sustaining human life makes agriculture which is the major source of food production very important. The recent agreement at the 28th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change where over 200 countries agreed to transition from fossil to non-fossil fuel makes the end of the crude economy imminent. The gradual introduction of electric cars and non-fossil energy into Nigeria is a clear warning that Nigeria needs to urgently diversify her economy and embark on radical exploration of her agricultural potentials as panacea to food scarcity and alternative to crude oil economy.
The first thing President Bola Tinubu should do in collaboration with Nigerian governors is to reorganise the security architecture of the country to make it capable and efficient enough to tame the marauding terrorist herdsmen, bandits and insurgents who have taken over Nigerian forests and farmlands and chased farmers away from their farm lands. When this is done and farmers can return to their farms, agricultural equipment and machines should be acquired and its services made available to genuine farmers at subsidized costs following the declaration of state of emergency on food production. Irrigation machines should also be provided to farmers where necessary. The National policy on Agriculture should be fine-tuned to leverage on and encourage the local production of bio fertilizer to encourage healthful farm produce since synthetic fertilizers have been found to constitute health risks.
Harvesters, processing machines and storage facilities should be provided to abate post-harvest wastage. The government should also buy back and store excess farm produce to encourage farmers and make farming attractive to Nigerian youths. Nigerian governments at different tiers should begin to provide facilities to enable proper processing, packaging and storage of farm produce. It is the lack of these facilities that has kept farming largely at the subsistence level in Nigeria for long. This is because most of the farm produce is perishable and so requires constant power supply, processing and packaging equipment to preserve. The absence of these facilities forces farmers to sell their produce at giveaway prices or lose large chunks of the produce to decay. To avert these losses, farmers are forced to restrict themselves to subsistence farming while youths who are potential farmers are discouraged from farming.
The Tinubu Presidency should invest a large part of the huge financial accruals arising from the fuel subsidy withdrawal into agriculture beginning from this farming season. Agriculture still represents a world of opportunities for Nigeria. It is also a cure-all panacea to the food, economic and other crises currently threatening Nigeria and her people.