‘Why we deliver extension services free to farmers’

Shuaibu Kere-Ahmed is the Director and Convener of Zuma Agricultural Harvest Festival, which is a flagship of Zuma FM in Suleja, Niger State. The community radio station currently focuses on delivering extension services and promotes agriculture as a means of empowering the rural audience who are mostly farmers. In this interview, he explains why they […]

Shuaibu Kere-Ahmed is the Director and Convener of Zuma Agricultural Harvest Festival, which is a flagship of Zuma FM in Suleja, Niger State. The community radio station currently focuses on delivering extension services and promotes agriculture as a means of empowering the rural audience who are mostly farmers. In this interview, he explains why they decided to transform most of their programming to agriculture.

 

Recently, your radio station held the second edition of Agricultural Harvest Festival. What is the rationale behind this fiesta?

To be honest, it was basically for societal and social change.  I have an opportunity to use radio to bring agriculture to the people, and the true sense of it is that 90 per cent of rural farmers depend on radio to get information.  The radio station itself is in a rural atmosphere, so we take advantage of our rural location and the vast land that we have in our radio station to bring the farmers around our vicinity together so that they can showcase their agricultural harvest here at the end of every planting season.

 

Before the introduction of the harvest festival, what were the programmes that you ran that brought attention to agriculture?

We held two harvest festivals. Before the first one,   we had only two agricultural programmes, but after the second one, we almost transformed our programming into about 60 per cent to 70 per cent agriculture. So our radio station serves as an extension service free of charge to these farmers. It’s a commercial radio station and it’s not like we have a huge sponsor that will say do this for this particular rural farmers. So we do it as a free extension service to the farmers that are around our vicinity; which basically covers Abuja, Niger, Kaduna and some parts of Nasarawa states.

 

Do you collaborate with partners, agencies or research institutes on this project?

Again, we are open to collaboration, but what we are doing now, even though we had initial support and  sponsorship for the harvest festival, we haven’t gotten any  research institution or government institution except maybe in the second harvest festival which we had support from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and the Bank of Industry (BOI) and also from the United States Government and some agencies under the Niger State  Government.  But we haven’t had any partnership with a proper extension service organisation in Nigeria yet. It’s something we are working on.  The whole idea of the Harvest Festival again is because there is a radio station which is in a rural area, there is also the fact that we’re in Niger State, which basically has the largest landmass in the country and is a potential agriculture basket of the country and there is also the fact that we are literally in the middle of the most fertile area in Nigeria. We are right in the heart of the so-called Middle Belt where everything around us is fertile. I’m talking of Kaduna, Nasarawa and Plateau states. Almost everything there is fertile.  So the idea of this festival is to make sure that it brings not only the rural farmers, but agricultural stakeholders from all over northern Nigeria and the country to come and meet directly and interact with the rural farmers.

 

What do you think you’re doing differently from other private radio stations on agriculture?

Again, we are literarily part and parcel of the farmers. We are an agricultural station now-not officially, but we’re getting there. First of all, I can guarantee you that this is an innovation that no other private radio station has done in Nigeria. We don’t just call out to farmers, it is a two-way thing. Sometimes they come into the station for pieces of training. We help them with fertiliser, and like a couple of months ago, the Hausa version of the Shehu Musa Yar’Adua-sponsored documentary, Swallow, which is essentially about food security, we called them to watch the documentary and more than 200 farmers turned out. A few months before that, we flagged-off the 2018 planting season where we basically gave them fertiliser and other farming inputs so that they could have a proper farming season. Also, after a while, we toured their farms. We have a cooperative which has a membership of over 600 farmers. To have a cooperative of 600 farmers is a big deal, and satisfying each member is a bigger deal. In every segment of their planting season, we are involved and as much as possible give them advice. We are also trying as much as possible to get the Anchor Borrowers’ Programme (ABP) for them.

As I speak with you, we launched a harvest festival magazine which is an agriculture magazine that talks about rural issues that affect rural farmers and other social investment problems that the farmers in every rural community come across.   The true essence of launching this magazine is because we want the proceeds to go back to the rural farmers. The Niger State Government launched it with N1m and in a few weeks time, we’re going to give the money back to the rural farmers.

 

How do you want to see service providers, agro-allied companies and other stakeholders key into this programme?

When it comes to radio, it’s a two-way thing.  If you are looking for publicity, you go to the radio, if you’re looking to have direct contact with the rural farmers, to be an off-taker, to have everything, we have the facilities. We have the instant connections with rural farmers to bring their produce for you to off-take. So you cannot find a medium better than radio for you to reach out to your potential clients.

 

How do you get the funding for this project?

When we started this, we were literarily doing it as a social project. We are not saying that we’re not in it for profit, but we are in it for operational expenditure. When we started this, I never knew it’s going to be this big; that is more of a fulfilling thing for me. I have an opportunity to use radio to help farmers around my vicinity. Yes, we may need sponsorship; it is not something that we can do on our own.

 

What do you hope to achieve with the harvest festival in the next few years?

With the two harvest festivals we had so far, we have been improving gradually. We are not in a hurry to blow, but we want to do it gradually, but if you say two, three years, I see it as two, three, 10 years essentially and I have told you we are right in Suleja; which is basically the middle town between Abuja, Kaduna, and Minna, so we want to create a hub for the farmers so that they can come and get agricultural inputs, pieces of training and financial services through our radio station. We have a long term plan, but right now our main goal is to satisfy the farmers that we have.  The long term plan is to make it a hub for every stakeholder in agriculture in Nigeria to come and interact with the rural farmers.