Agriculture Made Nigeria “Giant of Africa” Not Oil, We Must Fix the Sector – Prof Ikanni

Checking the place of Nigeria on the scale of the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) of zero hunger by 2030 becomes necessary as experts have continued to issue strong warnings on the likelihood of hunger related socio economic crises across the country, to forestall the negative impact of an uproar as a result of economic hardship at a time when Nigeria seeks to bounce back from the negative effect of the Covid-19 pandemic on its economy, further exacerbated by the Russia/Ukarine war, which has exposed the level of our overdependence on  food importation. In this exclusive interview, AgroNigeria speaks with an expert and stakeholder in the industry, Prof. Emmanuel Ikani, where he went down the memory lane of how Nigeria got the title “Giant of Africa”, neglect of the National Center for Agricultural Mechanisation (NCAM) and how Nigeria has derailed off the track of food sufficiency, while profering workable and measurable solutions. Professor Emmanuel I. Ikani is the Executive Director/CEO of the National Agricultural Extension and Research Liaison Services (NAERLS), Federal Ministry of Agricultural and Rural Development, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria.   What are your thoughts on mechanisation as it relates to the Nigerian agricultural Sector? From 1960 till date, we have never really done agriculture in the right sense of the word, what we have only been doing is farming. For one, the fact that over 70% of our adult work force are engaged in agriculture is a sign that we are doing farming and not real agriculture, because it should not be more than 10% of the adult population range that should be engaged in agriculture. Secondly, if you take the statistics of the tools employed in our farming space, you’ll discover that over 80% is made up of cutlasses and hoes despite the huge amount of money that has been expended in acquiring machinery like tractors, combined harvesters and other machines for logistics and processing from Europe and America. If you go to any part of this country where farming is done, the tools of our farmers are mostly cutlasses and hoes. Agriculture is about science, it is about technology, about skills, expertise and knowledge. Modern agriculture is knowledge driven. The actors in the field right now in Nigeria don’t have the skills and the knowledge and that is why they are still engaging with cutlasses and hoes.   What can be done to change this narrative? I strongly believe that if we must fix our agriculture to strengthen food security by having enough to eat and to export as well as to generate and create employment, we must begin to do things differently. To fix the agriculture sector in Nigeria, one area I think we should look into is mechanisation and when I am talking about mechanisation, I am not talking about going to Europe or America to import combined harvesters, tractors and other heavy machinery. The actors in the field are not skillful, they cannot manage such equipment which makes farm machinery end up being abandoned and lying waste across the states. It has happened before during the days of our Agricultural Development Programme or ADP, as generally known, many combined harvesters and other machinery were abandoned because the farmers didn’t have the skill to use and maintain them.   What is your idea of mechanised farming? My idea of mechanisation of Nigerian agriculture is simple, we need to look inwards. Nigeria has what we call the National Center for Agricultural Mechanisation (NCAM) in Ilorin, Kwara State. NCAM has a national mandate to design and fabricate simple labour-saving machines that can be used by Nigerian farmers and this has been done over the years. They have a good number of products on their shelves, but because focus is not given to them but rather the importation of machinery from Europe and other Western nations, this very critical agency that is supposed to transform our agriculture into a modern mechanised sector starting with simple labour-saving devices, has not been put to optimal use. So, my idea of how to reduce the massive use of hoes and cutlasses in our farming space is to be inward-looking and focus on core centers like NCAM, that can design and fabricate simple labour-saving machines.   What are the disadvantages of continuous use of crude tools for agricultural practices? The disadvantage of the continuous use of cutlasses and hoes is that farming will be very unattractive to the youths. The present actors in the field are aging out and who is going to replace them. Most youths are not interested in embracing agriculture that employs cutlass and hoes. Also, we cannot use this method of farming and think that we can engage in massive production that will ensure food sufficiency, and to have excess for export as well as to generate employment. So, what we need to do is go to NCAM and dust up the prototypes of these devices they have made, pick the appropriate ones, put them to test and get them adapted to work in our agriculture space and then we go into mass production of these devices. I learnt the mandate of the NCAM is just to produce prototypes, it is not their duty to engage in massive production. The responsibility of production is to industries and I want to suggest that there should be a deliberate effort to deploy the job of mass production to our industries. Nigeria is already blessed with some automobile industries, for example Innoson Vehicle Manufacturing company. I know that Innoson is producing trucks for the military and some logistic vehicles for the Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC). The principle for automobile production is the same, whether you are producing trailers or tractors, cars or Jeeps, it is all the same principle. I believe that if a company like Innoson is given the attention and mandate and encouraged to pick these prototypes designed by NCAM, they can mass produce some of these simple labour-saving devices. Then, the agriculture extension system in the nation can now be deployed into sensitising, promoting and distributing these devices across the nation and gradually we will begin to reduce the percentage of rudimentary tools used in our agriculture space. If this is done with all sincerity and political will, I believe we will become like the Asian countries. India and China went into engaging the idea of producing appropriate simple labour- saving devices and put them in the hands of the actors in the farming field, that is why they were able to improve their agricultural output to feed themselves, despite their vast population. The same can happen in Nigeria, we are the most populated country in Africa and we must feed ourselves. No nation can move forward in development without fixing its agriculture sector. A nation is what it eats, so I am suggesting that from now on, going forward, we should pay less attention to the importation of heavy machinery for our agriculture. Let us take advantage of some of our automobile industries. Pick the prototypes of NCAM, get them deployed, let them be mass produced and then the extension workers will go into popularisation (teaching) for local fabrications and gradually we will begin to reduce the percentage of the use of cutlasses and hoes.   How can Nigeria make agriculture attractive to the youth? If the aforementioned is operationalised, the result would be that we can now begin to have increased and massive production of agricultural output for national food security and export, which will lead to income generation and employment for our youth. The reduction of labour intensity, through the introduction of such equipment into the industry will definitely make agriculture attractive to our youths. These labour-saving devices can be introduced across the agricultural value chain for field work, land tilling, cultivation and planting. We, then, move to the ones for branding and packaging. With this, those not interested in field work can go into other aspects of processing, branding, packaging and/or marketing.   Post-harvest loss is a bane of the agriculture sector, why is Nigeria deficient in this area? Well, agriculture should not be labour intensive and as a backup, we must also have the mindset of reducing post-harvest losses. It is on record that over 50% of what we produce in agriculture is wasted between harvest and the table. This can be as a result of damages during processing, decay from lack of good effective preservation, insect attack in the field and/or during storage. Our system has not fully embraced the concept of value chain where we can, beyond harvest, go into the downstream sector of agriculture that has to do with processing, packaging and marketing. A good example of this is with vegetables; over 50% of vegetables produced in Nigeria suffer loss from farm to the marketplace. It is also the same in the livestock sector because some products of livestock are highly perishable. Milk that is produced and not properly stored will lose about 50% of its quality because the microbial content has been altered. Cold room systems to preserve milk, meat and fish is technology that we must look at.   Food storage depends majorly on electricity, what can be done to reverse Nigeria’s epileptic power supply? As you know, storage cannot be effective without continuous supply of electricity. For years we have been talking about electricity but we have not been able to get it right. A big country like Nigeria should be producing over 40 to 50 megawatts of electricity, but we are only producing between 2 to 4 megawatts and this has been happening for the past 30 years. It’s as if the generation, transmission and distribution of electricity has become a rocket science; though it is not, we have not paid attention to it. If you must embrace the value chain concept of agriculture, there must be a constant supply of power to reduce post-harvest losses particularly in the area of vegetables, livestock and aquaculture. On what could be done, Nigeria is in the tropical region of the world and we have about 12 hours of sunlight on a daily basis. Other nations do not have that privilege especially in the western hemisphere. So, let us take advantage of that and go solar; it doesn’t have to be gas or water electricity all the time because that has so far failed us for over 30 years now. In China the energy generated is about 40% and China is not in the tropics. So, I want to suggest that we should encourage private companies to invest in solar devices to power Nigeria.   How do you view agriculture? Food, for any nation, is about life, matters of agriculture are matters of life and there is no way Nigeria can go out of poverty, insecurity and insurgency if the issue of agriculture is not resolved because we all know that a hungry man is an angry man. An angry man cannot think straight, no man that is angry can reason properly. Secondly, the matter of food has no political boundary, it has no respect for any region; it is a common dilemma that must be fixed, if we must develop. There is no nation that has moved an inch in development without first fixing agriculture; you can’t debate that because agriculture is life. I want to say that no success in life happens by accident, it only happens by intentional and deliberate planning. Agriculture has worked for Nigeria before, why is it not working now? It is agriculture that gave Nigeria the title, “Giant of Africa” and not oil. We discovered oil in the 1960s and free money came into our hands and derailed us from our concept of agriculture. So, I think this is the right time, now that the oil economy globally is dwindling. I heard Nigeria’s production has even gone down by 15%, if we cannot learn anything, the message is that the economy driven by petroleum does not take any nation anywhere. Since agriculture worked for us before, during the days of the founding fathers of our nation, Sir Ahmadu Bello, Chief Obafemi Awolowo and Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, let us return to it. For us to make it work we must pay attention to mechanisation which is a modern way of farming that is driven by knowledge anchored on (ICT) technology. We have quite a number of institutions that have produced and are still producing a large number of graduates and we need to deliberately begin to synergise those youths, facilitate and engage them into agriculture to replace the aging population in the field. If we leave this country without paying attention to agriculture, we are going to have more problems.