A group operating under the aegis of Asiwaju Farmers Forum drawn from the 36 states of the federation and the FCT have said they would tap into the investment opportunities of cassava and maize proposed by the All Progressive Congress (APC) presidential candidate, Ahmed Bola Tinubu.
The group in press conference in Abuja Tuesday said their resolve to tap from the abundance of opportunities in staples crops like cassava and maize arose from last week’s assurance by Tinubu to massively invest in agriculture value chain if elected president.
National Coordinator and leader of the Cooperative Society, Mr. Retson Tedheke, said there must be a different approach to tackle the economy challenge for Nigeria to Work.
Retson noted that “something easy, simply but ultra nationalistic must be done. Let us reason. Our population is mostly not employable except in the art of farming.
“When a population is as uneducated as we are, we look for the low hanging fruits to get us rolling and working in large numbers even with machines. Our people, particularly, in rural Nigeria needs to be engaged in large numbers before they engage us violently with devastating consequences.
The national coordinator said localization, industrialisation and sustainable economy strategy would be key and the focus must be on productivity, processing, warehousing, rural stability and vocation manpower development that is focused on “agbado, cassava, yam, soy beans, palm trees, sesame, date palm, coconut, cattle, goats, sheep, fish, pigs, etc.
He noted that Nigeria’s imports must be on how to add value to what “we can produce locally, it must be on extra jobs, it must be focused on nothing but managing the evolving rural Nigeria quagmire and turning what is currently becoming a curse to blessing.
“The problem of Nigeria are Nigerians. Our failure as a country is our fault as a people. The USD is not coming down soon. Our hunger is not going away. We cannot import everything and expect our people to be free from the challenging economic mess we currently face.
“There are no immediate solutions outside agbado and cassava. No place will be safe if we continue to play with a hunger and angry uneducated population. Lagos is working even if slowly and steadily. Nigeria will work.
“Holland makes about $5billion annually from exporting flowers and $100billion annually from agriculture and agribusiness. Those who ridicule agriculture as the only foundation for national development are naive and ignorant about real national economic growth,” he said.
