by Ayo Akinfe
If Bola Tinubu is serious about solving Nigeria’s economic woes, he needs to come up with a unique agriculture policy centred around designer farming and processing.
[1] I have always believed that our innovative spirit will get Nigeria out of the economic doldrums and give us a gross domestic product (GDP) of $2trn in the not-too-distant future. Unfortunately, crude oil is acting as a huge distraction at the moment. It is a real fly in the ointment, and at some stage, we need to turn the taps off to get us thinking
[2] Nigerians differ from every other African because of our ability to “manage” things and our knack for “trying.” We are a very innovative people. You just need to see the way our mechanics will get a 30-year-old gearbox to work, how we panel beat 60-year-old lorries or how we fix the compressors of 40-year-old fridges to appreciate our innovative capability
[3] I once had a Guinean friend who wanted to ship a right-hand car back home from the UK ask me for a mechanic in Lagos who could charge over the steering wheel. It was then that I got to know that all West Africans change the hand of their cars in Nigeria before driving them to their nations
[4] Our biggest problem remains our inability to tap into this spirit en masse. One of the positive impacts of China on Nigeria, however, is that it shows us that we can push the boundaries of innovation to whatever level we want. Today, China is growing food in factories, building glass bridges, launching artificial moons in place of streetlights and has inter-continental ballistic missiles that can probably reach Mars
[5] By 2050, Nigeria will become the world’s third largest nation after China and India, so we must stop thinking like a developing nation and adjust our brains to think and act like citizens of an industrialised country. For starters, we carry the weight of 370m West Africans on our shoulders
[6] Just to let you know how Nigeria has dropped the ball, do you know that Aliko Dangote’s tomato paste factory shut down in Kano in 2019 because it could not gather enough tomatoes. Clearly, Aliko Dangote did not learn the lesson of his grandfather Alhassan Dantata, who went around northern Nigeria collecting groundnuts. Dangote should have initiated a West African Tomato Collection Programme so that, if anything, he would need to open another paste factory due to an over-abundance of tomatoes
[7] Now, the supply of farm produce is where Nigeria has a competitive edge. We are the world’s largest producer of certain tropical crops like yam, cassava, shea nuts, kolanuts, cashews, melon seeds, gourds, etc and can literally do what we want in the global marketplace with these crops
[8] Why, for instance, can we not offer designer yams in the shapes and forms people want and deliver them anywhere in the world at a premium? If people buy bespoke wine, cars, watches, chocolate and manufactured goods, why can’t this apply to the agricultural produce we supply too?
[9] We need to work on our food preservation technology so that, for instance, a yam tuber can last for a year without going off. Why can we not, for instance, supply a Merry Christmas sign designed of yam, deliverable to every country worldwide?
[10] Once we have a breakthrough with one crop, the floodgates will open. I can see all the world’s major food companies coming to Nigeria to open manufacturing facilities
