Mr President, hear my plea for farmers

over the years, have been terribly neg-lected by every successive government-Federal, State and Local- especially in their non-selection for recognition for their contribution to the growth and development of the nation. The people I am here pleading for are farmers. At the yearly National Honours Award, very few, if any, farmers ever get due recognition. […]

over the years, have been terribly neg-lected by every successive government-Federal, State and Local- especially in their non-selection for recognition for their contribution to the growth and development of the nation. The people I am here pleading for are farmers. At the yearly National Honours Award, very few, if any, farmers ever get due recognition. Mr President, this set of Nigerians are so patriotic and they have been so neglected that their neglect cries to high heavens for justice.
They never go on strike for days, weeks, months and even over a year as some of our other professionals do. Their sense of duty is too strong for them to ever think of abandoning their farm work for even a day as most of our teachers, doctors, nurses and others who offer so-called essential services do only to come back at the end of their long strikes to collect their huge salaries waiting for them for the time they never made any contribution. Farmers never hold the nation to ransom in spite of their well-known poor treatment. They go about their duties without grumbling or complaining. Nobody pays them a salary. Even when their crops fail for no fault of theirs, nobody shows them any sympathy or solidarity. Yet they do not disturb public peace and order to draw attention to their plight.
Sir, when the Millennium Development Goals were drawn up 14 years ago, no one appeared to remember the contribution of farmers and the need to focus on them. They recognized teachers and doctors and other healthcare providers. But them, none bothered. These people never spread AIDS like other groups do. They never engage in sexually transmitted degrees like some unscrupulous teachers and female do. They never mount roadblocks to harass innocent persons and to hinder social interaction and commerce. The only time they ever raise their finger in some kind of protest is when Fulani herdsmen provoke them to anger by unleashing their herds on their crops.
These people do not go on strike because some agro-allied professionals chose to call themselves consultants as our doctors do. If you call agric extension workers consultant agronomists, farmers will not bother because they know who is really producing food to feed hungry Nigerians. They do not go on strike because as the most important group in the farming sector, one of their own is not the one selected as minister in charge of agriculture. Sir, in fact when you appointed as minister over them a grammar speaking fellow who dresses in fanciful bow ties and pin stripped suits and looks like a man more suitable for the Wall Street than the dirty world of agriculture, they did not raise any issue at all. If it were our doctors, I am hundred per cent sure that they would have raised a hell of a storm and abandoned their hospitals to allow patients to die in hordes over such a seemingly light issue.
Farmers have such a great sense of national duty that in rain and in sunshine, in clement and inclement weather and in sickness and in health, they repair to their farms to produce food to feed other professionals who are very ungrateful, very slothful, very quarrelsome, very argumentative, very war-like and who seem perennially on the look-out for what to complain about.
Sir, the time has come in view of the noble qualities exhibited by farmers over the years, to devote one award year exclusively to this set of people. We can get from each state of this vast federation at least five farmers to honour with all the various categories of awards in recognition of their meritorious contribution to the fatherland. Another honour that can be done these people by a grateful nation is to give all registered farmers across the country a set of farm inputs free. That will not be too much in view of the fact that over the years, they have given and still continue to give without asking from the common till.
Sir, I was recently engaged in a discussion with some argumentative friends who kept calling education and health as the most critical sectors. I kept protesting that it is a misnomer, especially in our peculiar circumstances in Nigeria, to call those sectors critical. How can you call education in Nigeria critical when some of its leading practitioners can and do abandon their classrooms and students for over a year because they have some minor or easily resolvable dispute with government? How can you call health critical when doctors and nurses will abandon patients in critical condition on their hospital beds because they have dispute over allowances and the nomenclatures of other allied professionals?
In a sense, farmers have unwittingly been providing the ammunition for other idle and unpatriotic professionals to fight their often useless fights. Sir, as a citizen sworn to uphold justice I suggest that you should begin to think of getting someone to organise farmers so that any time other professionals such as teachers and medics do their normal thing of abandoning work over some frivolous grievance, they are denied food for the duration of their abandonment. This is to make the point that if you decide to stop your contribution to nation building, you should not be allowed to enjoy the contribution of other professionals.
Secondly, such a step will demonstrate to such ‘strikers’ that no profession is more important than another. In fact, if anyone should seek to make any point about the superiority of his own profession over another, farmers should be the ones to do so for if food is withdrawn for only a few days from say those academics who love to spew out Marxist rhetoric when they hold the nation to ransom, they will learn to be more humble. Sir, they will surely change their dialectics and realize that farmers actually hold the key to dialectical materialism! They will also realize that actions and reactions are never always equal and opposite!
Seriously speaking sir, in view of the greatly unrewarded contributions of farmers to the national edifice, I want to appeal to you to reserve next year’s National Honours Awards exclusively to farmers. These people never loot the treasury like others. They never threaten national stability like others. In fact they are the single most important guarantors of national stability. They don’t award contracts and get kick-backs and never get awarded inflated and over inflated contracts like others even if it is for the purchase of the very food thy produce. They are the least eaters and wasters of the food they produce under such dire conditions. They are the first to leave for their work places and the last to eat the food they produce. They often leave too early for farm to eat. While they are at work producing vitally needed food, some idle people who are sometimes on strike, are busy enjoying the sweat of their labour. How unfair has this unjust nation been to some of its most patriotic and conscientious workers!
They live a life of uncom-plaining sacrifice. The injustice done farmers over the millennia should be redressed, especially in the light of continued misbehaviour on the part of other citizens like doctors and teachers.