Before you start reading, try to recollect your experience the first time you went to buy tomatoes in the Nigerian market and discovered how expensive they had become. If you are not the market-going type, recall the first time you came first to first with the reality that tomato is now a “scarce commodity”.
Was it a sweet or bitter experience? Did you get a jolt when you were given three or four pieces of tomatoes for N500? Did you smile and pay, or did you shrug and pray: “God deliver my country”?
Or did you ask the harassed market woman that offered you the scarce vegetables, “Why?!”
Or did you scream the same question at your wife, house help, chef, or child?
I ask these questions because we are always looking at the wrong places for solutions. And we also have a penchant for looking for the wrong fellow to crucify. The average Nigerian will call for the head of President Buhari and the All Progressives Congress, and then pray that God intervenes in the tomato scarcity.
But in saner climes, the people will call for relevant specific public officers to properly analyse the situation, and clearly give the country a road map for recovery. They will ask questions concerning the quality of stewardship these officials had rendered to the country, because it is under their watch that the nation is witnessing the emergency. And these officers must give account.
That is the time public officials, who are not competent to chart a course for remedy, resign. They give way for other leaders to apply their know-how, and save the nation.
I say this because as you read this piece, the remaining tomatoes in many of the country’s tomato farms are reportedly suffering from an onslaught of tomato blight, which definitely will worsen the scarcity we are presently experiencing.
Instead of calling for the head of the President and raving for divine intervention, this is the time for Nigerians to appraise our agricultural research system. What have the agricultural research institutes been doing all these years?
How have they spent the funds voted for agric research year in and year out? To what extent did they prepare for tomato disease outbreak? What better species of tomato do they have in their labs? Any extracts as found in Kenya? How effective are their extension services to the farmers? Who is in charge of the country’s agricultural research? Who are the people he/she works with, and how do they operate?
I believe this is the time we should beam our searchlight on the sub-sector because in reality there is almost no research going on in Nigeria. And without efficient and professional research in the agricultural sector, the present government’s swank about economic diversification through agriculture shall end up as mere political braggadocio.
In the past, I wrote about promoting plant tissue culture as a private sector enterprise because I observed that most government-owned laboratories were empty and sordid.
The Agricultural Research Council of Nigeria is the agency saddled with the responsibility of supervising and coordinating the research, training and extension activities of germane agric research institutes in the country. Prof. Baba Yusuf Abubakar is its Executive Secretary.
Recently, www.financialwatchngr.com <http://www.financialwatchngr.com> published a story titled, “N59bn agric research spent fails to lift farmers’ productivity”. The report said that according to data from budgetary allocation to the agricultural ministry, the research institutes got an average of N19.6bn yearly in the last three years (2013 – 2015), yet low yield per hectare was recorded by Nigerian farmers in most food and cash crops, thereby throwing up questions around inefficiency, corruption and lack of supervision.
Interestingly, the report published the reaction of the ARCN boss to the situation. “We have a total of 13,000 staff members and 90 per cent of the yearly allocation goes into salaries and emoluments. Only 10 per cent goes into research. This is why the institutes have not been able to improve farmers’ output,” he explained.
On the surface, this justification sounds like standard government response to such inefficiency concerns. Everybody knows Nigeria is encumbered with recurrent expenses with nothing to show for innovations and developmental infrastructure. But a little scratch reveals that the problem with the system goes beyond funds.
Granted, our research institutes may be bloated; but there are indications that perhaps the best staff is not put in the right positions to deliver the best. And, the leader at the helm has not been as professional as he should be in making appointments to the many research organs under his agency.
In other words, judging from complaints from various stakeholders and news reports I had read, the Professor had given more priority to appointments than research work.
I saw the red flag when the Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Chief Audu Ogbeh, reversed all appointments and postings made by Abubakar. Why should everything be about appointments?, I asked. Even in a research system people still peddle office positions?
My concern is that WAAPP is strategic to Nigeria’s agricultural growth and should not be meddled with. In the last five years, the programme had operated in the West Africa sub-region contributing to increased agriculture productivity by strengthening enabling conditions for sub-regional cooperation in technology generation, dissemination and adoption. The programme under its first phase had succeeded in making fish farming not only lucrative but accessible to thousands of youths and women across the country.
Nigeria’s domestic demand for fish is about three million tonnes but not even up to half of this is met with the domestic supply. The gap is bridged through the importation of fish which is unhealthy for our economic growth and self-reliance as a nation. Hence one of the core objectives of WAAPP-Nigeria is to ensure increase in fish production by developing and releasing top-notch technologies in aquaculture for adoption in Nigeria and the ECOWAS countries to increase productivity.
All over the world research institutes are run with the best brains and most competent hands. So, there has to be a mechanism to mop up fresh brains from tertiary institutions in the country, and to mainstream a staff motivation model that will bring out the best in scientists and researchers.
Government must wake up to the reality that with a changing climate, our crops must be climate-resilient and our farming methods climate-smart. We can only achieve these through intensive research. For us not to fall into another tragedy similar to today’s tomato scarcity we must do the needful.
In other countries, there is always news about contributions of agricultural research to their development, but in Nigeria one cannot remember the last time a research from any of the institutes supervised by ARCN made headlines. This is the more reason why Nigerians should ask them to explain their work on tomatoes and what they plan to do about the blight.
PUNCH
END
A situation where 90% of a sector of any economy is used to service salaries, leaving paltry 10% for real work is counter productive. Such sector can never record any growth or contribute meaningfully to that economy.