I listened to the television broadcast by President Bola Tinubu on Monday, July 31, 2023. At the mention of 500,000 hectares of farmland, alarum bells sounded in my temple. I had to get the text of the speech. The following was pointedly inserted in the speech:
“Our plan to support the cultivation of 500,000 hectares of farmland and all-year-round farming practice remains on course. To be specific, N200bn out of the N500bn approved by the National Assembly will be disbursed as follows: our administration will invest N50bn each to cultivate 150,000 hectares of rice and maize; N50bn each will also be earmarked to cultivate 100,000 hectares of wheat and cassava. This expansive agricultural programme will be implemented targeting small-holder farmers and leveraging large-scale private sector players in the agricultural business with a strong performance record.”
There was thus the mention of 500,000 hectares of farmland as the policy target. But this was momentarily downgraded to 150,000 and 100,000 hectares of rice/maize and wheat/cassava respectively. The actual target is in effect 250,000 hectares of actual production. Perhaps, it was intended that the 250,000 hectares would be for first phase implementation, but devoid of milestones and timelines in the context of the entire framework of Tinubu’s quest to “hit the ground running.”
Based on the totality of my 27 years’ experience in the agricultural sector of Nigeria’s Federal Government, I can state without equivocation that Tinubu could not have been well served by the “agricultural people” he has surrounded himself with. The advisers need to get back to the school of reality.
First, the Federal Government has no land of its own. According to the Land Use Act that was embedded in the 1979 and 1999 constitutions, land is vested in the state government. Except for the Sahel North, even the state governors across Nigeria don’t have any land to freely donate to the Federal Government for whatever reason. Rather, the state governments must undertake compulsory land acquisitions, with the attendant payment of compensations to the land-owning communities. Thus, in many parts of Nigeria, the intent to access land in the magnitude of 250,000 hectares will be bogged down by the process. Much time will elapse, and any programme will be delayed.
On the premise of the very suspicious RUGA quest by the immediate-past Muhammadu Buhari administration in the last eight years alone, it is very doubtful if any community will permit its land to be compulsorily acquired pursuant to any federally implemented agricultural project.
It is now apt that I come clean and disclose my locus standi in agricultural cultivation in Nigeria. I was opportune to serve as the Director of Planning and Research for the then National Agricultural Development Authority from 1992 to 1999. The goal set for NALDA by the General Ibrahim Babangida regime was to replicate the idea of the Federal Land Development Authority that was established by Malaysia in July 1956. In a grave error of self-deceit, we often peddle the big lie that oil palm was taken or stolen from Nigeria by Malaysia. Yet, Malaysia started cultivating oil palm indigenously since 1892. But from 1956 to the present, Malaysia’s FELDA has been growing by leaps and bounds. Regardless, Nigeria’s NALDA was for no reason abolished on the advice of the Ahmed Joda Committee by the Olusegun Obasanjo administration in 1999. We have lost a great deal of ground.
Implicit in the new policy of the Tinubu administration is the return to organised plantation agriculture. But its cavalier conception and presentation via a TV broadcast self-defeats the seemingly noble intent. In the eight years that NALDA was allowed to operate, it was not able to attain its set national five-year goal to develop 55,500 hectares in the 36 states and the FCT. By 1998, only 37,000 hectares were under cultivation. One is left to wonder what magic wand will yield 500,000 hectares of crops, in no time as an antidote to the petrol subsidy removal.
First, it took over one year to set up the Abuja headquarters control centre and get the initial project funding into the budget. The Abuja office had to be staffed and accommodated. The 36 state governments were made to facilitate the setting up of their respective NALDA offices and staff them. Vehicles and ancillary facilities had to be emplaced. Despite being under a military regime with command-and-control mechanisms, it took almost two years before the project management framework was established across the country. How will the Tinubu administration handle this? Can it fare better while contending with states that are not led by the All Progressives Congress?
Northern states were easily able to identify and present 1,500 hectares out of three senatorial districts to NALDA for facilitated cultivation. But it became an uphill task getting 500 hectares in a contiguous location in most southern states. It was a greater task getting the indicated magnitude of land out of Anambra, Rivers, Akwa Ibom and Bayelsa states, despite the federally stipulated equality of all states. As it was then and so it is now, the coastal states will rather have fishing and rubber cultivation instead of cassava and maize farms. Being a military regime obviates any voluntary choices by the then communities. How will Tinubu impose maize, rice, cassava or wheat on the southern states? Or will they just miss out of the national project?
Cultivating any large parcel of land is predicated on several farm operations. It means perimeter survey to establish boundaries, land evaluation and soil testing for fertiliser management, laying out of plots for allocation, mechanised land clearing, sourcing of planting materials and trained extension workers across Nigeria. Would all these operations occur in advance of the rain-fed season that will take off in March 2024?
In those days, there was Steyr that manufactured tractors locally at Bauchi. Even then, it took quite some time to get the firm to deliver 400 tractors to the farm sites. Moving the equipment to the 36 states was quite an undertaking.
An important point worth considering is the farmer as the recipient of the intended farm business. Can he/she manage the economics of scale of a farm size of four hectares? Is the land site location reachable by the farming community? Has the nationwide insecurity challenge been satisfactorily overcome? How will the displaced farmers be enabled to participate?
Suppose the Obasanjo administration did not yield to being misadvised to abolish NALDA in 1999, it is most likely that the nation may have gradually progressed to having the now intended 500,000 hectares under commercial cultivation. NALDA was abolished at the time the idea was already gaining traction. All the then project take-off hiccups were being surmounted. Restarting the idea afresh by the Tinubu administration will have to run its course in the project cycle of implementation. It will take lots of time.
It is in view of the foregoing that I can flatly state that the policy goal recently announced by Tinubu is very unlikely to be realised in the foreseeable future. Most fundamentally, any federally conceived and out-of-Abuja managed agricultural project is unlikely to yield the desired results. A more practical option is to jettison any idea of another federal entity to manage the intended project. It would be better to institute a mechanism of making post-harvest matching grants that are predicated upon production to the states and prequalified private sector entities.
There is no other factor more than the matter at hand that validates the case for a decentralised Nigeria. The Federal Government should have no business with agricultural production. Neither should she be engaged in running educational institutions, medical centres and road construction. All these ought to be assigned exclusively to the second tier of government. In an economic zonal framework, regionalisation will engender positive competition as it was during the period preceding January 1966. Each differentiated region will execute its agricultural programme based on its peculiar ecology and the aspirations of its ethnic nationalities.
