Eye on Kebbi dry season farming

“The importance of agriculture to the economy cannot be over emphasised because economic diversification is the only way to prosperity. Go back to the land and develop agriculture because the era of depending on oil is over.” That was the matching order President Muhammadu Buhari gave Nigerian farmers while launching the dry season farming and […]

“The importance of agriculture to the economy cannot be over emphasised because economic diversification is the only way to prosperity. Go back to the land and develop agriculture because the era of depending on oil is over.” That was the matching order President Muhammadu Buhari gave Nigerian farmers while launching the dry season farming and Central Bank of Nigeria’s Rice Anchor Borrowers’ Programme (ABP) in Birnin Kebbi, Kebbi State on 17th November, 2015. President Buhari has made no secret of his determination to improve the base of Nigeria’s economy by reviving agriculture and opening the mines, among other measures.
The role of the CBN is to provide funding and for this reason it has set aside the sum of N20 billion to finance the ABP nationwide. The Nigerian Incentive-Based Risk Sharing System for Agricultural Lending NIRSAL), an initiative of the Bank, is engaged in capacity building for both farmers and extension workers. The Bank also sent officers from its development finance department to strengthen the exercise.
The role of Kebbi state government is to identify the farmers, verify their farms and coordinate the training. It is for this reason that the state government deployed National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) members to assist in the documentation of the farmers and their farms. Equally, the government engaged unemployed graduates for Train the Trainers (TOT) programme to further share knowledge about the initiative. In addition, the government mobilised 105 extension workers to further assist the farmers. The loans are to be disbursed through the Bank of Agriculture (BOA). In this regard, the BOA deployed additional staff for the verification of the farm sizes and account documentation of the 70,000 rice farmers selected to benefit from the ABP. Arrangements are also said to have been concluded for off takers to collect whatever is produced in terms of rice and wheat and to do so at prices that will encourage the producers. One can say then that this is a very attractive value chain production.
Except that three months to the commencement of the rainy season, a close look at the dry season farming in Kebbi indicates that the great expectations that followed the launching of the CBN’s N20 billion Anchor Borrowers’ Programme (ABP) have not been met. The ABP, according to Mr Godwin Emefiele, the Governor of Central Bank of Nigeria, was designed to create linkages between farmers and processors, ensure the output of rice and wheat and also bridge the gap between production and consumption.
Regrettably, there are credible reports that genuine farmers in Kebbi have not been able to access the loans they were promised. The ABP was designed to avoid the pitfalls of the past when many people took loans in cash and just squandered it. The ABP intends to identify genuine farmers and supply them seeds, water pumping engines, fertiliser, pesticides, some little amount of money for logistics as well as agricultural extension workers to offer advice from planting to disposal.
However, currently there are all sorts of complaints that only people close to the government were able to get the loans. Accordingly, many of them, who didn’t need them, got and sold the seeds, fertilisers, water pumping engines, etc. at the markets.
The Chairman of the implementation committee of the Kebbi Anchor Borrowers’ Programme, Alhaji Garba Dandiga, admitted though that he was aware of this problem. Many other farmers who did so said they either got the seeds late or the seeds were bad. Even those perceived to be highly placed in the ruling party or close to the government are known to have lamented the raw deal they’ve had so far as far as the ABP is concerned. Alhaji Mansur Shehu told stakeholders that the seeds advanced to him and which he had planted across his big wheat farm were bad and had refused to germinate. If you recall that the ABP was conceived to among other things address the previous losses incurred by rice farmers (their produce was eaten by floods), you would realise that it was double jeopardy for Alhaji Shehu.
Another farmer told me that he was cultivating two hectares of a wheat farm along the road to Makera. He said he didn’t wait for the seeds and water pumping engines of the ABP because it was getting late. Even when the pumping engines were eventually given to him, he discovered that they were substandard and so he sold them and bought genuine ones. The farmer added that he had to dig about eight boreholes to water the plants. “If I didn’t have my own resources, I’d have been late in planting”, he disclosed.
On paper, the ABP is another brilliant scheme to really revitalise agricultural production in Kebbi, nay Nigeria, but its implementation is clearly having hiccups and it is up to Kebbi state government to intervene decisively to ensure that it works.
First of all, the government should ensure that members of the committee overseeing the scheme are people of integrity and committed to the realisation of its set goals. Secondly, the government will do well to keep party apparatchiks and other bureaucrats away from appropriating what is earmarked for genuine farmers and not look at the ABP scheme as just largesse from the ruling coalition.
It is true Kebbi has all it takes to produce 50-60 per cent of rice and 20 per cent of wheat needed by Nigeria as Governor Atiku Bagudu said but all stakeholders (especially the government) are well advised to take all necessary measures to ensure that the current ABP doesn’t flop.