INTERVIEW
Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Chief Audu Ogbeh, in this interview, espoused his plans and programmes for the agricultural sector and assured that there will be no policy somersaults in the present government’s agricultural programmes. To start with, the ministry is working together with WAMCO, Promasidor and Friesland to ensure that one drop of milk produced by the massive cows in Mambilla Plateau should not be wasted. Excerpts:
You speak glowingly of policies and programmes you want to carry out. Have all these programmes been captured in the budget?
We demanded a huge sum of money but got only about a quarter of what we asked for. But when we sat with the President, he said he understands our situation; but we (Nigeria) do not have enough money to do all we want to do. So we should begin with the strategic areas like power and…because I too will need power to succeed in what I want to do. The Emir of Mambilla was in my house recently. They waste a lot of milk there; they have massive cows, cross-bred with capacity to yield, but they pour it away. So I told him that before September, we will build a mini-processing plant there. One drop of milk should not be wasted in this country and we are working together with WAMCO, Promasidor and Friesland. But what we’ve got, we’ve got to start working with and we may be getting some support from our donor friends. We’ll keep talking to them and whatever they bring, we will utilise well and keep pushing our agenda. But we will cut off things that are not immediately necessary and apply what we want to do because there are two things: Self-sufficiency in staples at home and then the drive towards exports. We have to earn the dollars to sustain our society’s needs.
Thirteen years after signing the Maputo declaration, Nigeria is yet to meet it. What are you going to do to persuade the government?
The plain truth is that this may not be in my lifetime because agric may never get 10 per cent of the budget. This year’s budget (2015) was 92 per cent recurrent and 8 per cent for everything else to service the whole country’s capital needs. So we have even tried this year that we have put 30 per cent for capital and 70 per cent is going for debt servicing and recurrent. How we got here is another issue. If you tell the civil service you are going to cut their pay, at any rate the naira is of little value, it can’t even purchase much, that is the dilemma we have been boxed into. By today, Nigeria should be talking of $300 to $400 billion in foreign reserves if we didn’t waste it all servicing other economies and bringing in poverty and unemployment here. But can you talk? If you talk, they will say you are talking grammar. The reality is, let’s import. What are we doing importing rice, sugar and milk? So this is the problem, it is very unlikely we will have 10 per cent.
What are you doing to support young farmers?
We have a programme for supporting the youth. We are likely to get some support from the AfDB of about $150 million, a good part of which will go into supporting some of these schemes, including fishery. I grow fish; I have a hatchery that can hatch a million catfish a month in Kuje here. I have five ponds and each can hold 40,000 catfish. I am just installing aerators now to put in oxygen. I am also by February going to be the largest single producer of castor oil in Africa. We produce transformer oil and all the hair creams and all the costumes and by September, I will have 18,000 farmers growing castor seeds for me. We had only 2,000 last year. So, a lot of these programmes are coming up. One of them is to develop the fish industry and we are inviting somebody from Vietnam to come and show that apart from Tilapia and catfish, we can also do some tropical fishes. So these young people are going to get support, those doing snails, fish, rabbit, grass-cutters etc, because where does a young person start from? If you want to borrow, they ask for huge collaterals. It may be unsafe to lend to agriculture, but it is more unsafe not to lend. Remember the 2005 SAP riots when banks were closed in Lagos for nearly one month, people raided banks? You can’t take a loan; young people with ideas can’t take a loan, one of the ideas we are looking at now is clusters of agro-industrial factory buildings to lend to young people.
Do you intend to continue with the E-Wallet programme of the past administration?
What I have said is that there will be no policy somersaults. We will grow along the existing policy lines, deepen and widened, because somersaults create anxiety among investors and many investors are coming. But we are also going to help that policy by creating extension offices in every local government so that on the spot, there is the office accommodating the expert and the private sector expert, teaching the farmers and renting machinery.
The opposition has cried out that the economy has been on the decline and with the over N6 trillion budget…
Remind my old friends in the PDP to go and hide their faces in the sand. Who left behind the disaster? N4 billion for prayers and the defence budget shared among people? Is that how to run a country? We came and met an empty treasury, what is Buhari supposed to do? Print notes? I was the PDP chairman and these are some of the issues we warned against that led to their almost trying to murder me. They shouldn’t talk like that. It’s not okay to talk like that. We have been seven months in government and the President arrived and found nothing, he has had to cope with this war which in six years the PDP government couldn’t deal with and whether they like it or not, Buhari has brought it under reasonable control. The explosives happened in Algeria for almost 20 years before they contained it but as a fighting force, Boko Haram doesn’t have the capacity they had before. $2 billion was kept for fighting the war and was shared by PDP and they have the guts to tell us that. But having said that, how do you deal with a depressed economy, spend your way through it? We borrow and pay. Believe me, the demand for Nigerian produce in the world today has never been this high, it is for us to wake up and meet it and we can. And those who do not believe in agric, we had a civil war here in 1967, how did we fight it? It was through agric. The war cost a million dollars a day, Awolowo was commissioner of Finance, Clement Isong was CBN governor, they restricted all imports, we fought the war and began rehabilitation and we didn’t borrow from anybody. But now, when you say cut down on imports, you hear shouts. People sit and order pizza from London and it’s delivered the next morning by British Airways, to show how sophisticated they are.
Do we have enough food such as eggs, for instance, to sustain the school feeding programme of the Federal Government?
No, we do not have enough eggs at all and it is not going to be cheap, but it will solve a whole lot of problems. This cash transfer that we want to do is to find a way to get more money into the hands of people on the street because how many civil servants does Nigeria have? At the Federal level, we have less than 2 million and if on their heads we are spending 90 per cent of our budget, then something is wrong. Those employed by government are less than 2 million and so there must be a way of getting money to the ordinary person on the street. So the cash transfer theory is not as bad as it looks. As for eggs and milk, we definitely do not have to give out by tomorrow. If we have to give an egg to every school child, that is 30 million eggs, which means we must have at least 46 million layers on the farms. What this means is that as we announce this, it will stimulate ambition among farmers. It means that there is room for more layers on the farms, it means the hatcheries have to expand, we have to increase layers. In Borno, Jigawa and Kano, temperatures are too harsh for these chickens. So we have to design new ways of building the pens because we need to produce 70 million eggs a day to satisfy Nigeria’s needs and to get there, we have to produce more maize and soyabeans. If you go to the South West, which is the poultry capital of West Africa, they have already got there; all they are waiting for is more maize and soya and if we can grow that, which the North can do, then the price of chicken will fall and the production of eggs will rise. So when you stimulate an activity in one sector, you create action in another. If you go to Benue and see the fruits they are wasting, it’s appalling. The mayor of the House of Lords visited me and he wanted to buy fruits. We are wasting fruits in Benue: Mangoes, oranges, passion fruit, avocado pears and watermelons, among others. But to export those mangoes, you have to learn to harvest the mangoes. You can’t shake the tree and let them fall because if they have bruises, they won’t touch it. We must device ways of harvesting them without leaving bruises. There is a device we use which holds the pod and cuts the fruit without leaving a bruise and it must be harvested before 8am and quickly moved to the cooling room until it is taken to the aircraft, leave at 7pm and arrive London by midnight and get to the fruit market by 1am and by 7am, to the supermarkets. They are coming here for a test-run and you can imagine the quantity of fruits. It is doable, but Nigerians must first be told that it is doable and we are among the most resourceful people in the world.
How are you going to tackle the issue of rice smuggling and local rice processing?
This year for instance, when we gave some rice to our staff, we gave them local rice. Our policy is local rice and there are giant mills in Nigeria now that can do 800,000 tonnes per annum and they are doing rice; they are doing rice as good as anything in Thailand or India, so there are no more stones. But we are going to go further. It starts from the farm, when the farmer has to bend down and cut the rice and beat it on the floor to try and winnow it, that is when stones and sand get in. We have rice rippers now, mini combines that cut and bag and so there is no reason for the rice to get on the floor. Also, the mini mills we are going to bring in have destoners and even colour separator. They have infrafred machines that pick out the black spots, I have some and steel mill. In another three years, we will not allow any rice mills that do not have destoners and if they don’t have them, we can support them.
Do you have any programme to support the funding of farmers?
The issue of loans has been a major one. But at the bankers conference three weeks ago, the bankers agreed that they were going to put in place N300 billion for lending to agriculture and we are trying to make sure that the money goes to the rural farmers. When you want to lend money to the rural farmers, the banker cries out, ‘will they pay back’? So what we want to do is to use the cooperative method, that the farmer should belong to a cooperative society so that members of the cooperatives are the guarantors to the banks and are the primary borrowers and if anything goes wrong, the cooperatives ensure it pays. Otherwise, there is no way the poor farmer in the village can have collateral that will impress a bank.
How about the N220 billion CBN credit facility?
There was a N200 billion agric credit scheme and the N220 billion small and medium enterprises scheme and people borrowed a lot and are paying back and the banks are still lending. The biggest rice mills in Nigeria now are in Kebbi, 320 tonnes a day, Laban, where almost 3,000 farmers deliver rice almost weekly. They grow and deliver. They took the loan and are paying back and the lending is still going on but then, politics got involved. I applied and was told I was politically exposed, so I didn’t get it. The programme I want to do now is to create a chicken processing plant and have 600 farmers in Abuja growing broilers and selling to me at 8 weeks and I process and remove the feathers and sell to the supermarkets. But the banks refused to give me money because of politics and so that became an issue. So some of us didn’t get, some did and some are actually utilising it. Ebony Agro, the former minister Ugwu was luckier than myself. But now maybe; if they refuse then there is nothing I can do, because the machines have to come from Turkey. Now if you are running a hatchery, you do artificial insemination, they don’t touch the ground they are in the cage, they are up there, veterinary doctors arrive in the morning, take the semen inseminate and you get 95 per cent hatchability, but the building itself is to be installed, that will cost about $150,000. So banks have been a problem; but I think they are solving that now and the interest rates with the CBN counter guarantees are now 9 per cent.
There have been talks about genetically modified products, are we not going to run into problems?
No, we have clearly avoided GM foods. We use only use high breeds.
What are your immediate to mid-term plans, sir?
The immediate is to start our nurseries, NIHOT, Palm Research Institutes have already been advised to prepare. We will find money from wherever to support them before the budget. We are supporting in wheat farming, fertiliser debts we owe, we have to start settling people, because fertiliser has to keep flowing. Luckily, we do not have to import urea from April, Indorama and Notore are producing enough even for export so the blenders, the NPK have gone for a meeting and we have a new thing in our ministry called the Geo-ecological map of Nigeria, where it tells you where to put a fertiliser and where not to put another, because people just throw out NPK or Urea. Putting urea where there is too much nitrogen cannot do the soil any good, so that map is coming in handy.
Are you taking advantage of the commodity markets?
The commodity people have come to see us and we are going to see them in January. But something went wrong there and they are afraid they are going to be totally run out of business. But we have 33 silos and we are about to lease them out for management and we are calling on the commodity exchange, since they do not have warehouses, to see how they can participate because there, you can store your grains and store them as securities and actually use them to take loans. They are designing a system which we will key into.
Farmers did not have access to the GES this year and there was less dry season farming, is there fear of hunger in the coming year?
There was a lot of dry season farming in the far North, but the North Central and the South are not doing much again because the governors of the far northern states have invested more in irrigation; it’s been a culture there and it is one of the things I am going to go round and tell the governors of the North Central and Southern states to pay attention to. We can’t rely on the rains and even if the yields are fantastic in the rainy season, we can’t rely on that because there isn’t enough food to feed because the population is rising. So there may not be hunger that much. However, the thing putting pressure is that in the North of Nigeria, there is another 60 million people feeding on us. We have Chad, Mali, Niger and even Libya. Trucks come from Libya and load food from the Maigatari market in Jigawa every Thursday. For Laila market in Sokoto, trucks come in from Burkina Faso and there is simply nothing you can do. They cross the border and come and buy food. It is an informal trade but there is nothing we can do because of the ECOWAS treaty. And this is the albatross we have with Seme border, where there is a warehouse for smuggling fish. It sits across the border line, the entrance is from Seme and the exit is into Nigeria. Now if you go there, they say they have broken no laws and yet arms and things are coming in. The Benin man does not eat parboiled rice, they eat white rice. So every grain of parboiled rice that gets into the country is coming this way.
-Leadership
