Former President Goodluck Jonathan whose aides are being tried in various courts of law in the country for monumental corruption, has revealed how he reduced corruption in the agricultural sector during his tenure.
Jonathan who revealed this in a speech at the Bloomberg studio in London said he used a simple mobile phone to reduce corruption in the agricultural sector and saved for the country billions of Naira in food imports.
On his efforts to fight corruption during his tenure, Jonathan stated: ”I think it is important to let you know my administration took many steps to curtail this scourge, in the areas of finance, agriculture and petroleum. To take just one example, we drastically reduced corruption in the agricultural sector with the help of a simple mobile phone.
”We achieved this by providing an e-wallet to farmers which grew the percentage of registered farmers receiving subsidy from 11% to 94%.And in the process we were also able to save billions of naira in fertiliser subsidies.
Through our Agricultural Transformation Agenda, we greatly boosted food production and saved almost a trillion naira on food imports.
”This one initiative had the benefits of improving food security, creating more jobs and reducing inflation to its lowest levels in over 5 years.
”Our ambition was to sanitize the corruption in petroleum subsidies by completely deregulating the sector. However, our efforts were frustrated by unhealthy political resistance.”
