How we can transform Nigeria’s livestock sector into modern business – Minister

Alhaji Idi Mukhtar Maiha is the Minister of Livestock Development. He is a seasoned dairy farmer with over 20 years of experience. In this exclusive interview on Trust TV’s programme, 30 Minutes with Mannir Dan-Ali, he spoke about his journey so far, his dream for the livestock sector, and the challenges that lie ahead.   […]

Alhaji Idi Mukhtar Maiha is the Minister of Livestock Development. He is a seasoned dairy farmer with over 20 years of experience. In this exclusive interview on Trust TV’s programme, 30 Minutes with Mannir Dan-Ali, he spoke about his journey so far, his dream for the livestock sector, and the challenges that lie ahead.

 

Before you became minister, you were a farmer. You also studied political science and ended up running a parastatal or a branch of the NNPC – the Kaduna Refinery. How did that first transition happen, between political science and administering an oil industry entity?

It has been one form of transition to the other. I definitely, yes, went to ABU, Zaria, I graduated with B.Sc. Political Science and thereafter I also had a master’s degree in the same field, and I had a stint in teaching at an A-level institution in Adamawa State, that was the College of Preliminary Studies, Yola, and I was recruited into NNPC in 1992 as a human resource person. I rose through the ranks, attending different courses, facing different challenges along the line.

I was also at NNPC Group; it’s a large group with lots of subsidiaries. I was at the headquarters where I served as GM, General Admin Services, and before then, I was also the manager, Admin and Personnel of PPMC, which is the largest of the subsidiaries of NNPC, and I also had the opportunity to serve as the GM Human Resources in Nigeria LNG.

So, you’ve been to so many different parts of the oil industry.

Definitely, and LNG is purely gas, liquefied natural gas, et cetera, one of the most successful companies in sub-Saharan Africa. We are very proud of it. Nigeria is very proud of that company; it’s doing wonderfully well. And thereafter, I was redeployed back to NNPC from Nigeria LNG, which was a three-year stint. I was posted to the refinery and petrochemical company as the Executive Director of Services, which was looking at all service arms aside from the operations that were purely dealing with the core, hardcore refining business and after some years there, the management of NNPC found me capable of running the refinery.

Which you did for how long?

I was MD of the refinery for about two years before I retired. That was my last bus stop.

And then you had the other transition; from running a big organisation to running your own farm. Why the interest in that particular area – dairy?

Well, I’ve had this abiding interest for a very long time. And let me tell you the trigger. I was in NNPC and there were all these kinds of retirements all over the place and I saw people who were bubbling with life, but somehow, because of the exit policies, people who had just exited, they were not ready. So I told myself I needed to find something to do after I retire, normally, statutorily, or when I’m retired. So I decided to do some level of eliminations. What business could I do? So I found out that after a long list of eliminations, I had to go into the food industry. Food has no alternative and therefore, in food, what aspect did I want to go into? Well, I just recall that as a young African village child, we had cows in my family. My father had some, and we were running around the countryside with them. And it was a beautiful, very wonderful, romantic, running with all those in the countryside. And maybe even drinking the milk directly from the udders. I was competing with the calf. So that was the life we led. And I felt probably that I needed to go back there and pick up. So I decided to go into livestock. But I told myself ab initio, I was going to do it the modern way.

So I started reading to convert myself from political science, from oil and gas, and that started in 2005. I was reading, I was asking questions, I was interviewing, I was traveling. Any country I had the opportunity of going to, I would stay on my own for an extra two, three days. To be able to visit farms and ask questions, take pictures, read, etc.

 

So you did a lot of research before you jumped into…

I did a lot of research. I visited so many farms in the country. So many farms in Africa, South Africa, Kenya, US, Egypt, the UAE, etc., and I was trying to compare what were the differences, what could work in Nigeria and what basically was unique in terms of what I wanted to do with livestock and that’s how I started in 2005; and I gradually built the farm as I was working.

Probably that’s why people were saying you were like a round peg in a round hole when you got appointed as minister. But what has been your experience since becoming a minister less than a year ago, that is, October of last year?

It’s been quite exciting and I love the challenge Mr. President placed before us. This is a new ministry; it’s never been created at the federal level since our independence. There has been a lot of advocacy. I was personally involved – a lot of campaign, a lot of lamentations about the neglect of that sector over the years.

But Mr. President, in his strategic wisdom, saw the volume and value of the livestock sector and created that ministry. However, how did it happen?

Exactly, I wanted to say how did they get to you?

I do not know. I was in my cubicle running Zaidi Farms.

That’s your own farm, Zaidi?

Yes, my Zaidi Farms. An unbroken history of 20 years of managing my farm. I saw frustrations, I saw challenges, but of course, I saw prospects. I saw the business angle. There were challenges all over the place. After the appointment, I said, look, what I was doing at that microscopic level would need to be now blown out at the national level because they are the same challenges; whether you are managing a small farm, a medium size, a big size in this country or at the national level, like what we are doing today. They are the same challenges we are going to face. So the challenges are there.

But for me, this is excitement. In the team today we have at the ministry, we have taken this as a national call. And we are doing our best to make sure that we lay the foundation for the transformation of the Nigerian livestock sector into a modern one.

When you are running your farm at the microscopic level, as you put it, you probably don’t have the challenge of a big bureaucracy like a ministry, where, like now as a minister, you may make a pronouncement and it will take quite some time before it shifts down to the factory level. How are you dealing with that? Because I believe coming from the business sector, you may be a bit frustrated with lack of speed.

Well, I am not frustrated. Rather, there are two different things. Coming from the private sector and looking at my own history, for instance, NNPC, basically we don’t have that civil service mentality. I’m sorry to say so. We don’t have that. You know, it’s running as a private entity. You know, the speed, the quality of service, the performance indicators, the goal orientation are all there. And then if you look at also the NLG again, it’s another higher level because basically what you have there, of course NNPC is the largest shareholder. You have the Shell, you have the E&I, you have the Total.

So that’s a whole mix. All the big international oil companies were there. But coming to the ministry as it were, yes, of course, there are certain things we find that are different, if you look at what happened in the private sector and what today happens in the public sector. But I will not say that there are frustrations here and there. Number one, this is a new ministry.

We have to get our team to bond, to understand each other, to share in the vision. And from then till now, when the ministry was created, we’ve been able to craft out our trajectory. Who are we? What is the mandate that the president has given us? How do we move and craft out the strategy? What are the legacy issues? So we looked at legacy issues. Right from the time of the National Livestock Transformation Programme.

We also looked at the RUGA policy. We also looked at the documents that led to the work that was done by Professor Jega’s committee on the Implementation of the Presidential Livestock Reforms Committee. These are very, very rich documents, all of them.

And when are you going to translate this into something that Nigerians can see and touch?

So we looked at all those documents. We had two technical sessions. We had one, the focus group. We got people from the ministry. We’ve got people from the private sector. We’ve got other people who have shown some very, very deep interest in livestock, and they knew actually what needed to be done. So we sit down, we look at all those documents. We read them, digested them, and sifted out.

What are the low-hanging fruits? What are the immediate terms, short-term and long-term things that we’re going to adopt? Then after that, another focus group now was called in. Out of those legacy documents that I’ve described, we now came out with a robust strategy that we called National Livestock Growth Acceleration Strategy.

 …You began implementing it?

Yes. What we have done with that document today is that we looked at the baseline, the numbers: What are the number of animals we have today in the country? What are the big challenges? What are the pillars that we need to move that strategy forward? Now that strategy has been approved gratefully by the National Economic Council.

I saw you saying that Nigeria has 24 or so million heads of cows ahead of South Africa and Kenya. Yet those two countries produce, like in the case of South Africa, more than a billion litres of milk, while Nigeria is just doing maybe… 600,000 litres of milk. So how are you going to transform from where we are with the local cows that some people call antiquated and not giving the result that they should? How are we going to see that transformation into these heavy milk yielders that we ought to have?

Not only South Africa. If you look at South Africa and generally most of the countries in East Africa, over the years, they’ve been able to transform their cows. Transformation here means superior genetics. And that means that there has been a concerted effort in research and improvement to move from indigenous breeds to modern breeds, high-grade, high-yielding cows. We have not been able to do so over the years.

But we’ve been trying it since independence because I recall even the Sardauna in the Northern Region, there are all those cattle improvement centres in Mokwa, in other places all over the country, but there’s a lot of discontinuity.

Those centres went away with the late premier himself. They went away with him. And what do I mean? After independence, we inherited a lot of these livestock breed improvement centres. Virtually every province in northern Nigeria had one. After independence, we did not build on those legacies. Rather, those centres somehow disappeared. I knew a few of them. But of course, it’s all history now.

Contrary to what we did here, Kenya, Malaysia, and India they were all ex-colonies of Britain with the same structure for livestock development. They continued to build on those foundations. And that’s where they are today, and we did not.

In spite of the high institutions of learning we’ve had, the premier universities, each one of them has had Faculty of Agriculture and Faculty of Veterinary Medicine. But there was a disconnect between the ivory towers and the market.

So, how are you going to reignite the handshake between the town and gown?

So what we are doing today, part of the growth strategy we are doing now, is to create breeding centres – lots of breeding centres. We have finished our planning. We have gotten the commercials and we are now going for a special intervention to be able to get superior genetics and cross with our indigenous breeds. We are crossing up to F1. We believe that at F1 we can get 15-20 litres per cow per day. But of course for some certain centres, for some certain urban producers, we can allow them to go to F2 and F3. Now by the time you get to F3, at the general level, the pastoralists may not be able to manage those. But of course here we are going to also capacitate them to be able to manage their cows in a modern way. And how do we do that? Apart from the knowledge, the know-how that we are going to transfer, we will also, on our ministry, undertake the radical improvement in disease and health management. But we are also going to be very, very aggressive in pasture cultivation.

You were talking about the measures you’re adopting at the ministry to transform it. You are talking of genetics, the pasture and health management. So, how are this going to change from where we currently are with cows roaming all over the country, trekking for hundreds, if not thousands of kilometres and being very lean and producing less milk to the destination you want to take us, cows with bigger capacity for milk production?

If you look at our ten pillars for the National Livestock Growth Acceleration strategies, in order of priority, number one is feed and fodder. Fodder is number one in livestock. Fodder is livestock and livestock is fodder, all the natural fibre that you can grow. That’s what we call fodder. These are deliberately cultivated purely for feeding animals just like you grow rice for human beings, you grow maize for human beings, you grow wheat for human beings, we need to start growing pasture for our cows.

I remember the former minister of agriculture, Audu Ogbeh, was talking about importing seeds of some grasses from Brazil. I wonder whether that happened or what are you doing differently now?

Well, we are looking for seeds. We have quite several seeds and varieties in-country. And we have contacted those who have them. Of course, they may not be sufficient. If they are not sufficient, we have to look elsewhere. What happened in the past has gone, we have taken lessons from there and we are going to do it in a different way. How are we going to do it? Number one, we have to look inwards. There are several people today, including my own farm.

I have had some nine varieties of grasses that I have been cultivating. We have NAPRI, we have IITA, we have a number of other producers who have been busy cultivating hundreds of hectares of pasture in the country, and they have been selling. I personally have been selling. So pasture is number one. Why do pastoralists move about? Moving about is not cultural, it has been happening for over the years. But it is a survival mechanism.

Today, during the rains, you have enough grass, you have enough water at point A. After the rains, or the onset of the dry season, the grasses have dried, they have been eaten up, water has dried. So naturally, because they have these animals that have to be fed. So, where do you have pasture and water? They have to migrate to point B. From the northern part of the country to the southern part of the country. Why are they going there? They are going there because of the abundance of free grass and water.

But that cannot continue any longer. Especially with all the conflict that we keep having with all the conflict, with all the crises, with all the marathons that the animals go through, there is no way they can put on weight. In fact, do we have cows or do we have athletes? Our cows have been turned into athletes. They are busy running and walking thousands of kilometers. They are busy running all over the place and they don’t actually go out for grazing.

But some people say that actually the herders are subsidising people who eat meat, because they have very little amount that they spend in feeding the cows, and that’s why the cows are still cheap.

No, no, no. that is the battle of the heart and mind of the pastoralists, we need to change that business model. Spend money on your animals and you get much more out of them.

Do you reckon they will agree with you?

Of course, we’ve been talking. Number one, because of the serious competition to scarce land resources; because of urbanization, infrastructure development, so many things are happening, Climate change and overgrazing. If today you have 1,000 heads of cattle that you want to go out and take them to point A in the morning before you arrive there, 3,000, 4,000 cattle are already there, what are you going to eat that they have left out? And that’s why today the biodiversity count is disappearing; in addition, you have climate change.

And then you have this conflict. How will you navigate this conflict, this politics, because there is a poisonous air around all this herding and what have you?

Yes, I think we are so emotional about this. We are not looking at the business side. We are so emotional about it. Animals today are generally a source of wealth. We call it livestock. What is stock there? It is wealth. But this wealth is on four legs. It is moving. While your building is not moving because this building is a stock, you understand me? Your clinic is a stock. It’s a repository of wealth and money. So that one is alive; it is moving -the bird, the poultry, the pigry, it’s money. It’s a stock.

The cow, the horse, the donkey, the cattle, they are all stock. So what we are doing now today is how do we address it? That’s why we are starting with fodder, and let me take you down further. If today the indigenous animals are well fed, as I feed my animals at zero grazing level in one area without tracking, they will give you minimum 8 litres per day because they are stunted, they are malnourished and that’s why they are not giving their best genetically.

Your ministry appears, or even our own conversation appears to be dominated by cows and milk. But that’s not the entire gamut of your ministry. You have the poultry sector that is currently facing a big challenge because demand is depressed and prices are falling while the feed stock is still expensive.

Yes. Most people, and this is one misconception, most people think that the ministry is about the ministry of cattle. It is not; because they have been facing a lot of pains from cattle. They are probably the most ubiquitous. You see them all over the countryside. Even within the city centre, you see them. You don’t see poultry birds, you don’t see pigs, you don’t see goats and you don’t see donkeys. If you see horses, these are during ceremonies. But the ministry is all about farmable animals. Starting from the bee up to the camel, everything in-between is farmable. That is the mandate of the ministry. Now you have spoken about poultry. We have had conversations with the feed mill association in Nigeria. There is a convergence between livestock and agriculture. What do you get from agriculture? You get a lot of grains to process feed for virtually every animal species, apart from the bee.

The poultry you need grains. The rabbitry, the goat, the sheep, the cow, all of them require grains. So with inflation in prices of commodities, that is bound to affect the poultry industry, and it has affected the poultry industry. But we have been talking with them to see how this can be eased out. We know there are challenges there. Aside from the feed itself, we are also looking at health issues. You know, avian influenza, so many other things. Because that is the most topical thing today, avian influenza.

Probably that is where the research institutes come in. The VOM, Veterinary Research Institute, and what have you. What plans do you have for them, or has it gone beyond the plan?

There is something actually happening now. We are just coming out. We have visited the place. We have spoken to them, the management addresses, they have written to show us actually where are the vaccines in terms of running that place. But beyond what they have told us, we have a vision of upscaling the activities in terms of vaccine production. Today they are only able to give us 15% of national requirements. What we require today is about 1.2 billion doses of vaccines across the range. Now, we have seen what we know what we need to do to be able to put them to do that one. But of course, we are also going to create a commercial department to be able to talk to the market.

Because they are probably not commercially oriented. Just like NAPRI which has the ShikaBrown, but then you don’t get them anymore.

So these are the two premium institutes we have under the ministry today and each of them is over 100 years old. It’s a thing of pride. But again, we are not resting our eyes on their past glory. We are looking at the future. Now, how can they connect to the market? How can they talk to the commercial sector? How can they today serve as a vehicle, as a fulcrum for this transformation of the livestock? Because they are very, very key. For NAPRI, it’s about research in genetics and breed improvement and then pasture. Of course, don’t forget that since the coming of this ministry, we have been able to register eight varieties of grasses that have not been done in the last 48 years.

But within the time scale that you may have as a minister, if you are lucky, up to the next election, otherwise, by the next time that the president does some rejigging, what is the key thing you want to achieve within the limited time which you are not even sure of the scale that you have as a minister?

For us today, we are laying a very solid foundation. The strategy I spoke about is a strategy that can take us right into the future. The strategy is talking about, in a nutshell, the best number today of the value of livestock in the country is $32 billion. We have this aspiration to grow it to $74 billion in the next five years. How do we do it? We are going to carry a torchlight to shine the way for the private sector, both local and foreign. Foreign direct investment.

You just came back from Brazil not too long ago. Do you see the development of this sector to be more foreign-driven because of the genetics and maybe better practices that we see elsewhere?

I don’t know if we are foreign-driven. The whole idea is that we are looking for superior genetics. This has come locally by performance-based research in terms of breed performance. This one is inclined to beef. This one is inclined to dairy. This one is dual-purpose. We can do that research locally. But we also need to get ready to jumpstart, to leapfrog the system by importing superior genetics in a limited number so that it can drive the numbers in terms of yield. That’s what we’re looking at.

I want you to touch on the Sokoto red that is said to produce the Moroccan leather. What plan do you have for the leather industry to revive it to the level that it was in the 60s, 70s when Nigerian leather was being exported?

Thank you very much. There is no Moroccan leather anywhere in the world. The so-called red leather was exported to Morocco and Morocco sold them to Spain and Italy. So it was called Moroccan leather. But these goats are indigenous Nigerian savannah goats. Moroccan goats are Sahelian. They don’t have the quality of the skin you are talking about.

But of course, I have plans. Already, there are people that we have cultivated, we have had conversations with. They are going into massive goat production to revive in terms of numbers the Sokoto red. Again, we have had a conversation with the Leather Research Institute in Zaria, which was established in the 60s and is still the only one we have.

In 1960, our population was probably 30-35 million. Today, we are 250 million. That one alone cannot satisfy us. It’s a research centre, it’s a training centre, etc. They have certain centres all over the North, in many states of the North, but that’s not sufficient. And what are we talking about? We are coming on stage today of several abattoirs and we are working with the red meat sector as well. Now, those hides and skins and each of these abattoirs, probably, the smallest of them, had a capacity of about 100 bulls per day. The biggest of them is going to have 1,000 bulls capacity per day. Imagine the amount of hides we are going to get. So that is going to drive the leather industry.

…You began implementing it?

Yes. What we have done with that document today is that we looked at the baseline, the numbers: What are the number of animals we have today in the country? What are the big challenges? What are the pillars that we need to move that strategy forward? Now that strategy has been approved gratefully by the National Economic Council.

I saw you saying that Nigeria has 24 or so million heads of cows ahead of South Africa and Kenya. Yet those two countries produce, like in the case of South Africa, more than a billion litres of milk, while Nigeria is just doing maybe… 600,000 litres of milk. So how are you going to transform from where we are with the local cows that some people call antiquated and not giving the result that they should? How are we going to see that transformation into these heavy milk yielders that we ought to have?

Not only South Africa. If you look at South Africa and generally most of the countries in East Africa, over the years, they’ve been able to transform their cows. Transformation here means superior genetics. And that means that there has been a concerted effort in research and improvement to move from indigenous breeds to modern breeds, high-grade, high-yielding cows. We have not been able to do so over the years.

But we’ve been trying it since independence because I recall even the Sardauna in the Northern Region, there are all those cattle improvement centres in Mokwa, in other places all over the country, but there’s a lot of discontinuity.

Those centres went away with the late premier himself. They went away with him. And what do I mean? After independence, we inherited a lot of these livestock breed improvement centres. Virtually every province in northern Nigeria had one. After independence, we did not build on those legacies. Rather, those centres somehow disappeared. I knew a few of them. But of course, it’s all history now.

Contrary to what we did here, Kenya, Malaysia, and India they were all ex-colonies of Britain with the same structure for livestock development. They continued to build on those foundations. And that’s where they are today, and we did not.

In spite of the high institutions of learning we’ve had, the premier universities, each one of them has had Faculty of Agriculture and Faculty of Veterinary Medicine. But there was a disconnect between the ivory towers and the market.

So, how are you going to reignite the handshake between the town and gown?

So what we are doing today, part of the growth strategy we are doing now, is to create breeding centres – lots of breeding centres. We have finished our planning. We have gotten the commercials and we are now going for a special intervention to be able to get superior genetics and cross with our indigenous breeds. We are crossing up to F1. We believe that at F1 we can get 15-20 litres per cow per day. But of course for some certain centres, for some certain urban producers, we can allow them to go to F2 and F3. Now by the time you get to F3, at the general level, the pastoralists may not be able to manage those. But of course here we are going to also capacitate them to be able to manage their cows in a modern way. And how do we do that? Apart from the knowledge, the know-how that we are going to transfer, we will also, on our ministry, undertake the radical improvement in disease and health management. But we are also going to be very, very aggressive in pasture cultivation.

You were talking about the measures you’re adopting at the ministry to transform it. You are talking of genetics, the pasture and health management. So, how are this going to change from where we currently are with cows roaming all over the country, trekking for hundreds, if not thousands of kilometres and being very lean and producing less milk to the destination you want to take us, cows with bigger capacity for milk production?

If you look at our ten pillars for the National Livestock Growth Acceleration strategies, in order of priority, number one is feed and fodder. Fodder is number one in livestock. Fodder is livestock and livestock is fodder, all the natural fibre that you can grow. That’s what we call fodder. These are deliberately cultivated purely for feeding animals just like you grow rice for human beings, you grow maize for human beings, you grow wheat for human beings, we need to start growing pasture for our cows.

I remember the former minister of agriculture, Audu Ogbeh, was talking about importing seeds of some grasses from Brazil. I wonder whether that happened or what are you doing differently now?

Well, we are looking for seeds. We have quite several seeds and varieties in-country. And we have contacted those who have them. Of course, they may not be sufficient. If they are not sufficient, we have to look elsewhere. What happened in the past has gone, we have taken lessons from there and we are going to do it in a different way. How are we going to do it? Number one, we have to look inwards. There are several people today, including my own farm.

I have had some nine varieties of grasses that I have been cultivating. We have NAPRI, we have IITA, we have a number of other producers who have been busy cultivating hundreds of hectares of pasture in the country, and they have been selling. I personally have been selling. So pasture is number one. Why do pastoralists move about? Moving about is not cultural, it has been happening for over the years. But it is a survival mechanism.

Today, during the rains, you have enough grass, you have enough water at point A. After the rains, or the onset of the dry season, the grasses have dried, they have been eaten up, water has dried. So naturally, because they have these animals that have to be fed. So, where do you have pasture and water? They have to migrate to point B. From the northern part of the country to the southern part of the country. Why are they going there? They are going there because of the abundance of free grass and water.

But that cannot continue any longer. Especially with all the conflict that we keep having with all the conflict, with all the crises, with all the marathons that the animals go through, there is no way they can put on weight. In fact, do we have cows or do we have athletes? Our cows have been turned into athletes. They are busy running and walking thousands of kilometers. They are busy running all over the place and they don’t actually go out for grazing.

But some people say that actually the herders are subsidising people who eat meat, because they have very little amount that they spend in feeding the cows, and that’s why the cows are still cheap.

No, no, no. that is the battle of the heart and mind of the pastoralists, we need to change that business model. Spend money on your animals and you get much more out of them.

Do you reckon they will agree with you?

Of course, we’ve been talking. Number one, because of the serious competition to scarce land resources; because of urbanization, infrastructure development, so many things are happening, Climate change and overgrazing. If today you have 1,000 heads of cattle that you want to go out and take them to point A in the morning before you arrive there, 3,000, 4,000 cattle are already there, what are you going to eat that they have left out? And that’s why today the biodiversity count is disappearing; in addition, you have climate change.

And then you have this conflict. How will you navigate this conflict, this politics, because there is a poisonous air around all this herding and what have you?

Yes, I think we are so emotional about this. We are not looking at the business side. We are so emotional about it. Animals today are generally a source of wealth. We call it livestock. What is stock there? It is wealth. But this wealth is on four legs. It is moving. While your building is not moving because this building is a stock, you understand me? Your clinic is a stock. It’s a repository of wealth and money. So that one is alive; it is moving -the bird, the poultry, the pigry, it’s money. It’s a stock.

The cow, the horse, the donkey, the cattle, they are all stock. So what we are doing now today is how do we address it? That’s why we are starting with fodder, and let me take you down further. If today the indigenous animals are well fed, as I feed my animals at zero grazing level in one area without tracking, they will give you minimum 8 litres per day because they are stunted, they are malnourished and that’s why they are not giving their best genetically.

Your ministry appears, or even our own conversation appears to be dominated by cows and milk. But that’s not the entire gamut of your ministry. You have the poultry sector that is currently facing a big challenge because demand is depressed and prices are falling while the feed stock is still expensive.

Yes. Most people, and this is one misconception, most people think that the ministry is about the ministry of cattle. It is not; because they have been facing a lot of pains from cattle. They are probably the most ubiquitous. You see them all over the countryside. Even within the city centre, you see them. You don’t see poultry birds, you don’t see pigs, you don’t see goats and you don’t see donkeys. If you see horses, these are during ceremonies. But the ministry is all about farmable animals. Starting from the bee up to the camel, everything in-between is farmable. That is the mandate of the ministry. Now you have spoken about poultry. We have had conversations with the feed mill association in Nigeria. There is a convergence between livestock and agriculture. What do you get from agriculture? You get a lot of grains to process feed for virtually every animal species, apart from the bee.

The poultry you need grains. The rabbitry, the goat, the sheep, the cow, all of them require grains. So with inflation in prices of commodities, that is bound to affect the poultry industry, and it has affected the poultry industry. But we have been talking with them to see how this can be eased out. We know there are challenges there. Aside from the feed itself, we are also looking at health issues. You know, avian influenza, so many other things. Because that is the most topical thing today, avian influenza.

Probably that is where the research institutes come in. The VOM, Veterinary Research Institute, and what have you. What plans do you have for them, or has it gone beyond the plan?

There is something actually happening now. We are just coming out. We have visited the place. We have spoken to them, the management addresses, they have written to show us actually where are the vaccines in terms of running that place. But beyond what they have told us, we have a vision of upscaling the activities in terms of vaccine production. Today they are only able to give us 15% of national requirements. What we require today is about 1.2 billion doses of vaccines across the range. Now, we have seen what we know what we need to do to be able to put them to do that one. But of course, we are also going to create a commercial department to be able to talk to the market.

Because they are probably not commercially oriented. Just like NAPRI which has the ShikaBrown, but then you don’t get them anymore.

So these are the two premium institutes we have under the ministry today and each of them is over 100 years old. It’s a thing of pride. But again, we are not resting our eyes on their past glory. We are looking at the future. Now, how can they connect to the market? How can they talk to the commercial sector? How can they today serve as a vehicle, as a fulcrum for this transformation of the livestock? Because they are very, very key. For NAPRI, it’s about research in genetics and breed improvement and then pasture. Of course, don’t forget that since the coming of this ministry, we have been able to register eight varieties of grasses that have not been done in the last 48 years.

But within the time scale that you may have as a minister, if you are lucky, up to the next election, otherwise, by the next time that the president does some rejigging, what is the key thing you want to achieve within the limited time which you are not even sure of the scale that you have as a minister?

For us today, we are laying a very solid foundation. The strategy I spoke about is a strategy that can take us right into the future. The strategy is talking about, in a nutshell, the best number today of the value of livestock in the country is $32 billion. We have this aspiration to grow it to $74 billion in the next five years. How do we do it? We are going to carry a torchlight to shine the way for the private sector, both local and foreign. Foreign direct investment.

You just came back from Brazil not too long ago. Do you see the development of this sector to be more foreign-driven because of the genetics and maybe better practices that we see elsewhere?

I don’t know if we are foreign-driven. The whole idea is that we are looking for superior genetics. This has come locally by performance-based research in terms of breed performance. This one is inclined to beef. This one is inclined to dairy. This one is dual-purpose. We can do that research locally. But we also need to get ready to jumpstart, to leapfrog the system by importing superior genetics in a limited number so that it can drive the numbers in terms of yield. That’s what we’re looking at.

I want you to touch on the Sokoto red that is said to produce the Moroccan leather. What plan do you have for the leather industry to revive it to the level that it was in the 60s, 70s when Nigerian leather was being exported?

Thank you very much. There is no Moroccan leather anywhere in the world. The so-called red leather was exported to Morocco and Morocco sold them to Spain and Italy. So it was called Moroccan leather. But these goats are indigenous Nigerian savannah goats. Moroccan goats are Sahelian. They don’t have the quality of the skin you are talking about.

But of course, I have plans. Already, there are people that we have cultivated, we have had conversations with. They are going into massive goat production to revive in terms of numbers the Sokoto red. Again, we have had a conversation with the Leather Research Institute in Zaria, which was established in the 60s and is still the only one we have.

In 1960, our population was probably 30-35 million. Today, we are 250 million. That one alone cannot satisfy us. It’s a research centre, it’s a training centre, etc. They have certain centres all over the North, in many states of the North, but that’s not sufficient. And what are we talking about? We are coming on stage today of several abattoirs and we are working with the red meat sector as well. Now, those hides and skins and each of these abattoirs, probably, the smallest of them, had a capacity of about 100 bulls per day. The biggest of them is going to have 1,000 bulls capacity per day. Imagine the amount of hides we are going to get. So that is going to drive the leather industry.