Our future belongs on the farm

I grew up in a village and I am proud of it. It is a heritage I would not exchange for anything. Murya, just outside the Nasarawa State capital of Lafia, is a thriving missionary settlement. My late father worked with the white missionaries nearly all his life, variously as cook, evangelist and teacher. Outside church, farming was the predominant occupation in that community. In a manner of speaking, the only culture I knew was agriculture.

The Middle Belt is the breadbasket of Nigeria. Nasarawa State is famous for its yams and for its black beans, rice, sesame and other crops. My father had green fingers. He had a pineapple plantation and also grew citrus, cashew, guava and what have you, besides yam, beans and maize. We all did our part on the farm, although, I must confess, my late younger brother, Iliya, was far better at it than I could ever be. I found farmwork hard — the sheer drudgery of it rather exasperating. Amid the gold-coloured cornfields, my mind would wander off into unknown distant horizons. Most people don’t realize that the physical labour involved in farming is difficult and quite backbreaking. To this day, when I drive through rural homesteads of the ancient savannah of my birth, my heart goes out to the peasants and their families who have continued to labour in the same way their ancestors have done for more than a millennium.

In those tranquil rural backwaters, the rumblings of violence and war hardly ever registered in our community. The one occasion was the desperate fleeing Igbo families who came to live with us during the unfortunate pogroms in the north. Apart from Grandmother Celia, Baba was the kindest soul I had ever met on this earth. He lived the purest form of Apostolic Christianity whose hallmarks are purity of heart, service, love, compassion and humility. There was no electricity in our village, not to talk of TV. Apart from faith and farm, the only thing to do was to read books. We devoured all the children’s classics, Tom Brown’s School Days, Children of the New Forest, the tales of Enid Blighton – the lot. We did not have many toys, but we were extremely healthy and happy kids; well-nourished physically, educationally and spiritually. In that rural paradise, childhood was a rhapsody of astonishing joy.

I have brought in these personal peregrinations to make the point that I know agriculture not as a theory but as a lived experience. Growing up, I have absolutely no recollection of any agricultural officer or extension worker from the government who ever passed by to give a helping hand. There was little help from the state whether in terms of fertilisers or other subsidized inputs. For a country of our size, that was an extraordinary lacuna in public policy.

Although I never studied agriculture as a subject, my background in social science and my interests in economic development have brought me into serendipitous work in agriculture. As a first year undergraduate in 1976, I spent an entire summer working at Daberan Farms in Daura. The farm was owned by the then Emir of Daura and was just a stone-throw from the Niger border. Daura, as some of you would know, is the hometown of President Muhammadu Buhari. A dozen of us were posted there during Obasanjo’s military government’s Operation Feed the Nation (OFN) scheme.

The Emir, to all intents and purposes, was an absentee-farmer. We never saw him. But we were his farmhands. After the searing afternoon heat, we would all retire to luncheon of fura da nono and noisy arguments over Marx and the merits and demerits of capitalism. The lives of the peasants in the far-north seemed to me as miserable as the narodniki serfs of the Russia of Tsar Alexander. Water was always in short supply and inputs such as fertilisers and pesticides were distributed as grace-and-favour items. Malnutrition and disease were rampant.

During my national service year 1978-79 I found myself teaching at a relatively rural school in the town of Arigidi, near Ikare. That small town struck me as a vortex of uncommon spiritual energy, both good and bad. As it turns out, it is the hometown of Prophet Temitope Balogun Joshua of the Synagogue Church of all Nations fame. It also happens to be the birthplace of Otunba Gani Adams, National Coordinator of the Oodua Peoples’ Congress (OPC). Akoko Anglican Grammar School, where I taught, had a large farm. During and after school hours pupils and teachers worked on the farm. I also served among the rural farmers in the community, helping with weeding, harvesting and whatever else was there to be done.

Recalling my days as a young man studying in France, I spent a summer with a farming community in rural Auvergne. It was a large farm with a lot of cattle and sheep. I recall days milking the cows and doing other chores. In the evening we would eat home-made cheese and recite the poems of Villon and Lamartine under camp fire. This is the glory that has made France what it is. Succeeding generations of French statesmen from Charles de Gaulles to François Hollande would tell you that “nous sommes tous des paysans” (we are all peasants). French agriculture has a pride of place in national policy. Since Bonaparte, they have always understood that an army marches on its stomach and that a nation that cannot feed itself has no place of honour in the comity of nations. La Banque Agricole de France emerged as a rural farmers banking cooperative. Today it is one of the leading banking institutions in the country.

During the early years of my career at the National Institute, Kuru, I worked on issues of agricultural reforms. My particular focus was on the River Basin Development Programmes and the World Bank-assisted development projects. Those were the years when rioting farmers in Bakolori were gunned down by policemen as they protested the ecological damage being visited on them by the World Bank Bakolori Dam Project. What I found on ground was quite depressing. The policy paper we produced recommended radical reform and privatization of state-owned agricultural projects.

While doing graduate work in England I was recruited by the Food Studies Group (FSG) in Oxford. The name of the organization has since been changed to Oxford Policy Management. It was fun working part-time as a consultant and being handsomely paid for it. I found myself coordinating major UN and World Bank projects for the FSG. I found myself rubbing minds with people who had done original work on agrarian reforms, rural planning, shadow pricing and the likes.

Later in life, my career path led me to the African Development Bank, serving in Abidjan and Tunis. One of the more important projects I worked on was a new framework for Development Finance Institutions (DFIs). We wanted to address the question of why agricultural banks and other similar DFIs were not functioning as well as they should on the continent. We designed a strategy for intervention in that sector and I was among those who developed a financing instrument by way of Lines of Credit for agricultural banks and other DFIs. It is for others to judge whether such instruments have made any difference.

During 2007-8, after I left CBN – luckily with my life intact — the UNDP/DFID recruited me as a technical adviser to the Minister of Agriculture. My job was to help design a commercially sensible subsidies scheme for the agricultural sector. It was again a fun job. I found myself working on questions as varied as tractors, pesticides and herbicides as well as agricultural credit. We advised on how to settle the white farmers chased out of Zimbabwe by Robert Mugabe. I got the CBN to structure a loan scheme for them and to assist them in every way to settle in Nigeria.

We have come full circle as a country. We were once a leader in tropical agriculture. Awolowo’s agricultural settlement schemes in the West were a great success. So were some of the schemes developed by Michael Okpara in the East. We were a major exporter of cocoa, rubber and palm produce. The groundnut pyramids in Kano were touring above the skyline — they reminded one of ancient edifice of Giza. We could feed ourselves as a country. Then came oil. We all abandoned the farms. With a surfeit of petro-dollars, our people became poorer and more malnourished. Now that the chickens have come home to roost, we have no choice than to return to our first love.

We need nothing less than a paradigm shift in our development thinking. There have been all sorts of clever schemes for agriculture, from People’s Bank to the Directorate of Food, Roads and Rural Infrastructures. Most of these schemes have failed. They failed not necessarily because of incompetence or corruption. They failed because they lacked the enabling environment and the requisite institutional architecture. We must do things differently.

We need to place agriculture at the heart of our national policy. At a time of dwindling oil fortunes, we must make agriculture a strategic pillar in our national renaissance. For us to succeed, we must create the right environment for agribusinesses to flourish. We must look at the value chain, the tax regime, the exchange rate, the logistics of haulage and transportation, rural electrification, water, support industries and institutional mechanisms to ensure the sector flourishes. The kind of agriculture I have in mind must look beyond peasant holdings – although that should be the heart of it – to increasingly large-scale operations based on scientific practices, deploying technology, research and innovation; with an eye to capturing global niche markets. I would like to see agriculture become the anchor for a massive industrial revolution in our country. Where there is a will there is a way.

(Revised Text of a Paper Delivered at the National Workshop on a New Agricultural Policy, Jointly Organised by the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and the National Agricultural Foundation of Nigeria, Held at the Yar’Adua Centre, Abuja, 2–3 February 2016).

 

Obadaiah Mailafia