Sokoto River Basin Project: So Much Water, Very Little Use

When one succeeds in visiting the 26,436 hectares of developed farmlands prepared and fully utilized for all-year round farming of assorted crops and vegetables one’s hopes would come alive. The project is under the Sokoto-Rima River Basin Development Authority (SRRBDA) and it covers the four states of Kebbi, Sokoto, Zamfara and Katsina States with this […]

When one succeeds in visiting the 26,436 hectares of developed farmlands prepared and fully utilized for all-year round farming of assorted crops and vegetables one’s hopes would come alive. The project is under the Sokoto-Rima River Basin Development Authority (SRRBDA) and it covers the four states of Kebbi, Sokoto, Zamfara and Katsina States with this huge project one would think that Nigeria is close to attaining President Goodluck Jonathan’s policy on food security.

 

But when the farmers open up on the way and manner government, its officials and policies are frustrating them, one is shocked. It is doubtful if government is sincere towards boosting agricultural production by the year 20:2020.

The Sokoto-Rima River Basin, an agency of the Federal Ministry of Water Resources. It has the mandate to provide the four states with raw water for treatment of plants and distribution through water pipes for domestic and industrial uses and to farmlands for irrigation.

At least a visit to Goronyo Dam in Sokoto State, Bakalori Dam in Zamfara State and Jibia Dam in Katsina State revealed that the three dams are all performing their primary roles of regional water supply and distribution and flood control. The Zobe dam in Katsina State that has not pumped as little as a cup for public consumption since it was commissioned in 1983, has been able to pump out water through its emergency spillways to avoid flood.

Thousands of farmers tilling the 26,436 hectares of farmlands, out of the 43,336 hectares. Planned to be equipped, developed and provided for the them by the River Basin are into mass production of assorted crops and vegetables. They include rice, maize, sorghum, wheat, cassava, garlic, onions, pepper and tomatoes among others. These man have complained of neglect by the federal government which has not been rendering any form of assistance to them.

One of the leaders of the farmers’ associations in Goronyo, Sarkin Noma, Musa Makeri Takakume, said none of the over 1,000 farmers at the Goronyo irrigation project got a single bag of fertilizer from either the authorities for this year’s farming season.

“The year is almost ending because we are already in August. As at today, no single farmer got a single bag of fertilizer from either the federal government or Sokoto State government. They made us to travel to Sokoto and register. Till now nobody called us to collect a bag of fertilizer or seedlings. We have been buying the fertilizer we have been using from the market at N6,600 per bag.

“It is the grains from our last season’s product that we are using as seedlings because we have no means of getting the improved seedlings. The agric extension officers from the state government which supposed to be coming around and giving us technical advice do not come until harvest time. When we complain of locusts invasion, they will come and spray the farms when we do not need them. The locusts will still come. We have said repeatedly that the best time to spray the farms is early September for wet season farming and February for irrigation. But instead, they will come and spray around June when they are not needed.

“Another problem discouraging farmers in Goronyo is absence of companies to either buy our produce or preserve them for us. We are producing rice a lot but in the whole of Kebbi, Sokoto and Zamfara States there is no standard rice milling company that can mill our product. We thrash it locally and in the process, a good quantity is wasted. When we mill locally, nobody wants to buy because it is mixed with sand and stones. Because we lack storage facility, we always like to sell our products immediately after harvest when the price does not at all appreciate. Sometimes we even sell below the cost of production,” he said.

But the story is different in Zamfara where farmers at the Bakalori irrigation project, Talata-Mafara said though they were not given a single bag of fertilizer or improved seeds by the federal government for this year’s farming season, Zamfara State government has sold fertilizer to the farmers at N1,000 per bag. Also, the regional office of the River Basin in the state has made arrangements with a private firm that provided them with improved seeds and additional fertilizer at N5,500 per bag instead of the N6,500 it is sold in the open market.

Ibrahim Ali Rimi, who said he harvested 150 bags of rice from his farm and helped his father to harvest his 175 acres of rice in the last irrigation season, said he and his father got three tons of fertilizer from the state government at N1,000 per bag and bought the remaining fertilizer they required for their farms from the private firm introduced to them by the River Basin.

Civil servants in the state are also not left out. They joined the league of farmers who produced food and cash crops from their farms under the Bakalori irrigation scheme of the Sokoto-Rima River Basin Development Authority. Mohammed Salisu Gurbi and Abubakar Mohammed Dan-Bauchi are federal civil servants in the state and they are farmers in Mafara.

Gurbi said he is into wet and dry season farming and has harvested between 50 to 200 bags of onions and several bags of rice,  bales of millet and vegetables. He said at harvest time, a bag of onions cost N1,000 to N1,500, but if the farmer can preserve it for some months and sell at the peak of demand, it cost between N30,000 to N40,000 but warned that the process of preserving onions is delicate and require a lot of efforts.

“First, you have to erect local silos of thatch that air will be entering always. After harvest, you will spread the onions in an open space, either on clean sand or dried grass for, at least, three days and nights for the water in it to dry up. After that, you will separate the wet and those that are mistakenly cut by hoe or objects from the nest. Those ones cannot be put in the silos because they will rot and damage others. You then put the good ones in the thatched silos and cover them.

“Unless children use sticks to pierce them they will remain good, nothing will happen to them even if they are there for a year. After planting onions, it takes three months to harvest. But there are some species that take three months and two weeks before they can be harvested. Last year, a bag of un-husked rice was as low as N3,000 but the price has risen to N6,200 now. When the minister came here on a visit, she told farmers that government was going to cut the importation of foreign rice by 50 percent. That might have informed the appreciation in the cost of local rice in the market,” he said.

But Dan-Bauchi, who claimed that he harvested 300 bags of rice, 20 bags of sorghum, 20 bags of maize and 50 bags of millet, said he got all the fertilizer he used from Zamfara State government at N1,000 per bag, adding. I am yet to receive any fertilizer from the federal government, though I registered for e-wallet fertilizer sale and free seeds.

“Our main problem here is the quelea birds. They come in large droves and invade our farms from morning to evening. As we are talking now, they are everywhere on our farms. The state government said they did not have the capacity to fight the birds because they did not have aircraft that could spray chemicals on them. They reported to the Federal Ministry of Agriculture, our farmers association also reported, but no action has so far been taken.

“What we are doing at the moment is to hire two boys per hectare and pay them N10,000 per month each, to be beating drums or metals to scare away the birds. The method is not very effective because the birds are getting wiser daily and some resist the noise of the drums. They remain around for months. On one of my farms, I was expecting to harvest 50 bags, but I could not get up to 10 bags. The birds had eaten up everything,” he said.

At Dutsin-Ma in Katsina State where the famous, but unutilized Zobe dam had abandoned since it was commissioned in 1983, farmers who spoke to Sunday Trust said they had not been able to use the dam for irrigation farming. The reason is that the construction of the channels that meant to convey water to the farmlands from the dam had not been completed. Now, the project has been abandoned.

One of the farmers, Malam Idi Tsauri, said, “We have all these years been watching the dam with a lot of water that we can neither drink nor use to farm.

We can only farm during the rainy season and when the annual rain is not enough, we watch our crops dry off beside the dam. I think we should just gather and cover the dam and use the land for something better, if government cannot put it to use. I wouldn’t know if our agricultural production is increasing or decreasing here. But I know that we can do better if provision is made for us to embark on irrigation farming,” he said.

At Jibia in Katsina State, a border town between Nigeria and the Niger Republic, farmers are utilizing 1,500 hectares of the 3,500 hectares designed for irrigation farming from the Jibia dam. The River Basin is working towards opening up the remaining 2,000 hectares for enhanced agricultural production.

Conducting Sunday Trust round Goronyo Dam and the entire Rima valley and other adjoining irrigation projects, the Assistant Project Manager, Engineer Shuaibu Isa said Goronyo Dam is designed to provide water for irrigation and the development of the downstream areas of the Middle Rima Valley and Zauro polder project in Kebbi State, covering 17,000 hectares.

He said the Dam is also designed to provide an annual regulated flow of 425 million cubic meters of water to double the current rice cultivated wetlands from 40,000 to 80,000 hectares. He said the project also supplies 80 million cubic meters of water to Sokoto in Sokoto State and Argungu and Birnin Kebbi water schemes in Kebbi State.

At Bakalori in Zamfara State, the Project Manager, Muhammad Lawal Maidoki, who conducted the Sunday Trust round the dam said the Bakalori irrigation project was designed for 30,000 hectares but only 23,000 hectares had so far been developed and put to use. He said 8,000 hectares were being used for surface irrigation while the remaining 15,000 hectares are being used for sprinklers.

Maidoki said the Mafara irrigation project has started double cropping, where rice and other crops are planted and harvested twice on a farm. He added that arrangements had reached an advanced stage to introduce triple cropping to maximize production. He said the River Basin is holding periodic meetings with farmers in the area to ensure that they are carried along.

Speaking to Sunday Trust in Sokoto, the Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of the Sokoto-Rima River Basin Development Authority, Engineer Khali Yusuf said some of the strategic rivers in those states are River Sokoto, River Rima and their tributaries adding that, River Sokoto and Rima are tributaries of River Niger itself.

“In Katsina, for instance, you have the Karadua, you have the river Gada. On Gada you have Jibiya dam, while on Karadua you have the Zobe dam. The biggest dam we have is the Goronyo dam, which holds 945 million cubic meters of water and, like most other dams, we are also using it for flood control, irrigated agriculture, water supply, fisheries, domestic water supply, tourism and navigation.

“These are some of the reasons why these dams are being constructed. One of the major functions is to ensure that you release a greater portion of the water in the reservation during the dry season so that when the rainy season comes, you will have enough space to contain as much water as possible. The history of River basin generally started in the 1970s because of the drought we had, particularly in the northern part of Nigeria, where a lot of crops dried up as a result of insufficient water.

“The whole idea was to develop and provide reserved water particularly for agriculture that goes along with the other functions I mentioned to you earlier. With the dams in place, we now have a situation where water flows throughout the year, especially for irrigation and domestic usage. The River Basin Development is an idea which emanated from the Tennessee Valley Authority of the United States of America which was done back in the 1930s in order to take care of depression at that time. We have done a lot by putting in a lot of infrastructure on ground. Government is doing more in the area of managing them,” he said.

On the issue of problems the farmers are facing in marketing their farm produce, the MD said, “there is a very big marketing problem because there are no serious agricultural produce marketers around to buy these things from farmers. There are no processing industries around the place, which could buy the farm produce from the farmers, process or preserve them. We cannot market the crops for them, but we can facilitate by reaching out to the entrepreneurs.

“But where are they? We are trying to reach out to the private sector. There is endless amount of food items here. They can always come around and buy them in large quantities for domestic and industrial purposes. The farmers have very good crops and vegetables in large quantities to sell. We need to encourage them by buying these things in a way that they will be encouraged to go back to the farm.

“If the farmer does not sell his farm produce, there will be a problem because he will not go back to the farm next year and then there will be scarcity. Some of the items they produce here in large quantities like rice, wheat, sorghum and beans can be stored for a very long time. But vegetables like onion, pepper, tomato that are perishable, need to be sold immediately, otherwise they will perish. So, these are some of the challenges which I know the farming communities are facing,” he said.

On the problem the farmers are facing in getting improved seeds, fertilizer and services of agric extension officers, Engineer Yusuf said, “We have been doing everything possible to assist them because we have realized that there are some of these  shortcomings towards improved productivity. Improved seeds, fertilizer and other farming inputs, just like the extension services, are not within our mandate to provide to the farmers. But we have discussed with the states through the state ministries of agriculture.

“There was a time when the River Basins were also providing those kind of services. Even the federal government was channeling some of the fertilizers and farming inputs to the farmers through the River Basins, but that is no longer the case. You will realize that most of the fertilizer now are being dispensed off by state governments. I have written a letter to the Ministry of Agriculture in Sokoto requesting them to provide some fertilizers to our farming population, particularly to those at Goronyo middle Rima irrigation project because they do both dry and rainy season farming,” said.

Explaining the ties between the irrigation farmers and the River Basin, Engineer Yusuf said, “The dams have been constructed by the federal government. The irrigation facilities have also been constructed. The middle Rima irrigation project at Goronyo is a 5,000 hectares irrigation system immediately downstream of the Goronyo dam. The lands belong to the farmers but the federal government has come in and provided land improvement by providing the infrastructure, the channel system and drainage system for draining the water on to the land.

Though the Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Dr Akinwumi Adesina could not be reached for comments, he said in a speech delivered on his behalf at an event in Owerri, Imo State by the South-East regional Director of the Ministry, Dr Uche Nwafor, that Nigeria is the world’s greatest producer of cassava, but her relevance in the world trade of cassava is not visible.

He attributed the reason to planting of unimproved varieties, poor management practices and poor processing infrastructure.

The Director General of National Biotechnology Development Agency (NABDA) and Open Forum on Agricultural Biotechnology (OFAB), Professor Bemidele Ogbo Solomon said poor fertilization, drought, viral and bacterial diseases that affect plants such as cassava roots have been identified as major constraints threatening food security in the country.