The precarious economy of Nigeria
According to the Christian Bible, when God created Adam and Eve, presumably the first parents of all mankind, he placed them in a beautiful garden of plenty, but when they sinned through the devil in serpent’s clothing, God condemned them. them and their descendants to a life of work like this: “All your life you will sweat to produce food until the day you die”. The same message is repeated in the book of Psalms: “With the labor of your hands you will eat.” In the Epistles, Saint Paul unequivocally told his listeners: “He who does not work, let him not eat.” Since then, many generations of people in various cultures of the world, including Nigeria, have continued to extol the virtue of hard work, especially in the area of exploiting the abundant riches of the earth through the cultivation of the land: agriculture.
Nigeria, without a doubt, is a nation endowed with agriculture. Leading economic historians of the past and present centuries, both Nigerian and expatriate, agree that agriculture was the mainstay of the traditional economies of the various peoples of Nigeria in the pre-colonial and colonial periods. Until the early 1970s, agriculture accounted for more than eighty percent of Nigeria’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and the main value of the country’s exports.
Then came the oil boom, and instead of strengthening the agricultural sector with the millions of petrodollars accumulated in the oil sector and transforming Nigeria once and for all into an economy with enough food, the government in power squandered that opportunity and in Instead, he actively encouraged the Nigerian population to abandon agriculture and become 100 percent dependent on crude oil. Nigeria thus became a single-product economy. Oil became the axis around which the country’s economy revolved, in such a way that any earthquake in that sector had adverse negative effects on the entire economy. The then Military Head of State, General Yakubu Gowon, overwhelmed by the huge sums pouring into government coffers from crude oil, is reported to have said that Nigeria’s problem was not money but how to spend it, so embarked on extravagant spending on white elephant projects that had little or no positive demonstration effect on the economy.
After Gowon, successive governments seemed to have realized the mistakes of the past and thus made efforts (albeit half-hearted) aimed at redirecting Nigerians back to the farms by initiating certain agricultural programs such as the Development Program of the River Basin (RBDP), Operation Feed the Nation (OFN), Green Revolution (GR), the Directorate of Food, Roads and Rural Infrastructure (DFRRI), the Better Life Program for Rural Inhabitants (BLRDP), among others. Specifically, OFN was launched in the context of an alarming decline in agricultural production, skyrocketing food prices, rising food import bills, and an accelerating outflow of young people from rural to urban areas. Unfortunately, it did not bring any positive results, except that the huge allocated sums ended up in private pockets. Its successor, Green Revolution, was also an abysmal failure, creating bigger problems than it ever solved.
To solve the problems created by GR, the ruling government embarked on an unprecedented import of rice, wheat, and other foodstuffs through a Presidential Task Force. Overnight, Nigeria, which used to export food to other countries, became one of the world’s largest food importers, with consumer goods topping the list of Nigeria’s import records. This situation has continued to worsen over time. A recent report by US Wheat Associates Inc., a trade group for the world’s largest wheat exporter, says Nigeria will soon overtake Japan as the largest buyer of US wheat. According to the report, “The markets that are really growing are located in Africa. Nigeria’s per capita income is growing and Nigerians are consuming more food and looking for more Western-style food products.”
About twenty years ago, a program was started to get Nigeria to grow wheat in order to reduce excess income spent on importing wheat. Once again, during his tenure as president of Nigeria, Olusegun Obasanjo tried the same thing with cassava, with the aim of making cassava flour an important component of Nigerian bread and thereby reducing the country’s dependence on cassava. imported wheat. But like programs before them, these initiatives died almost as soon as they were conceived. Currently, Nigeria spends more than 50 percent of its income on food, according to Dr. Vincent Akinyosoye, Statistician General of the Federation and Head of the National Statistical Office.
The abandonment of agriculture had negative spillover effects. As more and more young people continued to acquire higher education certificates and degrees, they increasingly saw themselves as people who had nothing to do with farming. The rural-urban drift, which began in the early days of colonial rule, continued irreversibly until rural villages were deprived of their main labor force. Today, there is severe famine in the land, and many Nigerians live hand to mouth. Food shortages continue to intensify by the day as the price of available food continues to skyrocket. It has gone so bad that the average Nigerian worker spends around 80 percent of their monthly income on food. The idea of three full meals has long stuck with many Nigerian families.
It is partly for this reason of hunger that nothing else seems to work in the country. Much of the effort that the average Nigerian puts in on a daily basis is first channeled into filling their empty stomach. His main problem is food, and until he gets it, he can’t think of anything else. Of course, only when a man has filled his stomach and is not worried about the origin of his next meal, can he think of how to advance his nation.
This situation raises some serious questions: Why has Nigeria continued to import most of its food fifty years after independence? Has all the farmland in Nigeria disappeared? Are the lands no longer fertile? No crops to plant? Or are Nigerians too lazy to farm? Is it the government or the people who should take the blame? Where exactly does the problem lie? What is the possible way forward? Honest answers to these critical questions can help Nigeria trace its way back and avert a looming food crisis. Indeed, it is unfortunate that Nigeria, with its superabundant human and material wealth, is still grappling with the fundamental problem of providing food for its citizens when all of its peers are constantly breaking new ground in science and technology.
While in Makurdi, Benue State, during the year-long compulsory youth national service, I was very impressed that virtually everyone I met, particularly the students, talked about their farms, with some even taking the time to go to the village to cultivate and care for. their farms. But whether that is still the practice today is a topic for future research. Much may have changed considering that today’s children are embarrassed to say that their parents are farmers, and not talk about themselves. Farming has come to be seen as an occupation for the poor and the never-to-be-prosperous, and young people in the cities who think they have become rich discourage their parents in the villages from engaging in farm work because they feel that their parents , having given birth to rich children, they have grown too great to be called farmers.
Under the current circumstances, Nigerians do not need fortune tellers to tell them that there is imminent danger. As such, there is an urgent need for all Nigerians to return to the farm. Internal food sufficiency should be the concern of all citizens, because feeding oneself is feeding the nation. Once again, the government should take the issue of food supply seriously, not through importation, but through active support and encouragement of local farmers. If possible, a state of emergency should be declared in the agricultural sector. It does not end with including agriculture in the 7 Point Agenda. Pious statements must be backed up with positive actions. Without a doubt, no nation can advance where more than half of the population goes hungry. Similarly, the need for Nigeria to become less dependent on food imports and work towards domestic food sufficiency is non-negotiable, as, according to Professor Onwuka Njoku, external food dependency is the most pernicious form of national insecurity.