The Agriculture Legacy of Udom Emmanuel

Moses Ekpo, Deputy Governor of Akwa Ibom commends the vision of his principal, Governor Udom Emmanuel, concluding that the governor has let out the genie in the agriculture sector of the economy

Akwa Ibom State Information and Strategy Commissioner, Comrade Ini Ememobong and I may have been brought together by a kindred spirit. The two of us are completely sold on the “Udomestication” gospel in the agric-sector, a gospel which we preach on every available podium.

On a recent Comfort FM radio programme, I reiterated that: “a significant proportion of the food consumed in Akwa Ibom is home-grown,” courtesy of Governor Udom Emmanuel’s renaissance in agriculture. And by a fortuitous happenstance, Ememobong was at the same time leading a team of visiting Rotarians to plant coconut trees in Ekpeneobom, unwittingly providing field-backing to my claims.

It was not our first time on such open-air agri-evangelism devoted to the governor’s revolution in the sector. Apart from hands-on involvement in sponsoring his constituents on farm programmes initiated by this administration, including the Akwa Prime Poultry out-growers scheme, I, not long ago made a signal appearance on the Bush-House show at the ObioAkpa Campus of the Akwa Ibom State University, the veritable cradle and heart of agriculture in this part of the country, which I have ably railroaded into a farm broadcast.

That scintillating performance was captured on the back page of The Pioneer newspaper edition of October 15 – 16, 2018, captioned: Deputy Governor Takes Udom’s Green House to Bush-House. As for Ememobong, a visit to his village is all you need to know that for him the “husband man that laboureth must be the first partaker of the fruits of his labours.” His entire homestead has been transformed into a demonstration farm, illustrating that Governor Emmanuel’s back-to-land crusade has caught on well within his “work-place family circle” as an example for others to follow. And this was when he was still the Publicity Secretary of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the state

You can can take the Information Commissioner and I as a cross-section of the State Executive Council, indicating that the immediate foot soldiers of the administration are leading from the front. But a farm culture, or any other culture for that matter, is never genuinely ingrained until the ordinary folks have been seen to run with it. How then has the agri-Dakkada credo of Governor Emmanuel fared with the mass of Akwa Ibom people? How deep are the roots of the governor’s legacy in agriculture – have the people enduringly imbibed his vision of a farm-driven revolution in the economy of the state?

Inherent in these queries, is the more fundamental question of approach; for as we know, the end is largely a function of the beginning. The governor started out on the road to revolutionize the agricultural sector of the state’s economy appropriately with a road-map, the Akwa Ibom State Agricultural Policy and Food Sufficiency Strategy document, which was publicly presented in July, 2017.

Here is Governor Emmanuel’s definition of the relevance of the document as captured in his foreword to the document, “The time-tasted model used by most developed economies of the world to shift the frontier of human development has been that of laying a strong foundation for building a nexus between agriculture and industrialization. Having to provide a blue-print that clearly shows the intent and direction of government in the area of agriculture is a fundamental issue, hence the need for an Agricultural Policy and Food Sufficiency Strategy document.”

And for the necessary psychological disposition to perseveringly and steadfastly follow the road-map, the governor launched “The Rise To Greatness (DAKKADA)” campaign, which among other things, typically reassured the people of the state that agro-speed, though snail-speed, is indeed durable speed. “Now is the time for us to obey the Biblical injunction to wake up our mighty men and beat our swords into plowshares and spears unto pluning hooks,” Governor Emmanuel said in his official Dakkada launch speech, quoting Joel 3:10.

To spearhead the field deployment of the resultant plowshares and pluning hooks, the state government floated the Akwa Ibom Enterprises and Employment Scheme, AKEES, a youth engagement programme, meant to leverage the “can do” spirit of the young amongst us in order to prove a critical possibility – namely, that common vegetables such as tomatoe, carrot, cucumber, onion and water melon, etc, can also grow on Akwa Ibom soil. AKEES was placed under the supervision of the Bureau of Due Process Technical Matters led by Elder Ufot Ebong, a Senior Special Assistant.

Six years down the road, Breghnev Langwa, the Chief Executive Officer of the Cameroonian firm, Benny Agric Group, commissioned by the Bureau to replicate in the state his country’s success in the cultivation of these crops, has this to say on how the experiment has fared so far, “Cynics have been converted, prominent among them is one of our farm managers, Ukpong Ukpong, who used to write for a very critical tabloid here in the state. The special Cameroonian Ndini and Saira early-maturing varieties of cucumber which were initially rejected in the local market are current market leaders. And the tomato content of the Udom vegetable experiment came in handy during the “tomatoeebola.”

He said Governor Emmanuel heralded a revolution in vegetable farming which has come to stay. The value-chain created is one of its kind. The chain includes farms across the state, belonging to 13 forward-looking youths of the one hundred he trained under AKEES, to the popular Ibom Vegetable Inputs Company at No. 500 Oron Road, Uyo; among other agri-allied outfits currently servicing the resultant and ever spiraling cyclone of farm activities in the state. It also includes the 10 hectare hydroponic Green-House near Ibom Airport, which is also a demonstration initiative to illustrate that the dichotomy between nature and nurture can be collapsed, putting the farmer’s fate squarely in his own hands.

What about the refrigerated off-taking van component of the value-chain, which he said Benny is bringing in with an eye toward eventual processing and packaging of vegetable products in order to cross the Rubicon with the revolution. “And so with what has been demonstrated so far, the story has since changed from ‘it cannot work here, to Governor please give us money to grow vegetables,’’’ Langwa said with a glint of vindication in his eyes.

In between, the state government has introduced other epochal and life-touching agricultural programmes, obviously firing on all cylinders so as to deliver the utmost from its limited tenure. These include the One Million coconut-per-day-processing-capacity coconut refinery and its accompanying 11,000 hectare coconut plantation project. To augment its feed-stock requirement and put the company firmly on the road to sustainability, the governor recently declared August 21st every year as the State Coconut Day, during which about 300,000 coconut seedlings are expected to be planted across the state.

Local Government Councils in the state have also been directed to provide at least 50 hectares of land for coconut cultivation, while about 230 public schools are planting an estimated 300 coconut trees each in their respective premises, all in an effort to ensure that the refinery is fed to capacity when fully operational.

The other significant investments in the sector which are aimed at creating new partnership opportunities for financially and technically capable investors are the cocoa fermentation and drying plant; tractor and agricultural equipment hiring services; corn shelling machine; rice processing factories and mills; the 64,000-metric-ton-per-year capacity fertilizer blending factory; fodder bank and cattle ranching project; goat multiplication and the poultry hatchery project, among others. “The fertilizer initiative of the administration has been hailed as the main-plank of the Udom Emmanuel revolution in agriculture given the racket that used to bedevil fertilizer procurement,” said Mr. Johnny Udo, the Managing Director of Greenwell Technologies, the Abak-based company anchoring the fertilizer production and supply component of the Udomagri-renaissance.

The roots of any legacy are as deep as they are durable. When we try to make impact in a people’s life by targeting the area of their traditional economic engagement, durability of such impact is automatic. For whatever it was worth, hitherto the agricultural economic staples of AkwaIbom oscillated between cassava farming and palm oil production, enhanced by scattered sea-food prospecting activities by the state’s riverine populations. With aggressive interventions in the entire value-chain of cassava and the oil palm, Udom can be said to have gone to the very heart of the economic life of the people of the state.

“This explains why the end-to-end smart business model, aka wholesale value-chain development for sustainability, is being considered by the governor to be even more critical for cassava,” according to Ofonmbuk Nelson, Head, Directorate of Agricultural Investment, Akwa Ibom Investment Corporation, AKICORP. At the moment in the state, investment in cassava runs from government coordinated farms in 15 local government areas in the state, to state-of-the-art processing mills in Ikot Okudom, Eket LGA; Nung Udoe in IbesikpoAsutan LGA and Ikot Ekang in Abak LGA – each in the three Senatorial Districts of the state. There is also a warehouse and off-taking centre in Ikot EkpeneUdo, NsitIbom Local Government Area, Nelson revealed. Its holding capacity is 1,000 metric tons of products, 500 metric tons each for raw cassava and garri, he said.

This much was confirmed by the Executive Director of the Directorate, doubling as Commissioner for Lands and Water Resources, Pastor Umo Eno, who also added that two more warehouses are in the pipeline for the two other Senatorial Districts of the state. He said that his Directorate plans to engage 100 youths in each of the 31 local government areas of the state as cassava out-growers whose raw cassava would provide guaranteed tuber and garri feedstock for the mills and warehouses in order to ensure a predictable and steady pricing regime for cassava products.

Presently, the effect of current government interventions on the prices of cassava products such as garri, is essentially interim in nature; coming, as it is, from government coordinated sales of the products at give-away prices and controlled quantities. The Executive Director assured, however, that in the next couple of months when the end-to-end model would have been fully unfurled, prices of garri and other staples would be drastically reduced even in a free-market situation.

And with the coming on board of the Ibom Fadama Micro-finance Bank, the circuit would have been completed for a turn-key cassava sub-sector investment portfolio attractive enough for our youths to leverage on without the sense of meniality associated with the traditional farming methods which are also fraught with drudgery and apprehensions about possible market glut and the resultant nose-dive in prices.

Ditto for the oil palm sub-sector, the age-old life-wire of the Akwa Ibom peasantry and main-stay of whatever economy existed in the state, outside the civil service, before the Udom Emmanuel fillip and game-changer. There is at the moment a beehive of activity at the Akwa Palm Company in Esit Eket, which has been moribund for some years now. According to Pastor Eno, the 3,000 hectare oil palm estate is being remodeled under the strict supervision of the Nigerian Institute for Oil Palm Research, NIFOR, as consultants to the Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) charged with delivering a thriving business concern from the initially stagnating oil palm plantation.

“Indigenes of its host communities of Mbo, Esit Eket, Eket, and Urueofong Oruko are already being mobilized as out-growers such that in the end we will be able to feed the 50-ton-per-day fresh fruit bunches, ffb, processing mill which we are currently setting up for the plantation,” Pastor Eno enthused in happy anticipation of what is in the offing for Akwa Palm, including the tank farm which is to hold the Special Palm Oil (SPO), to be harnessed from both the plantation and the out-growers.

This can only amount to stirring the hornet’s nest in a positive sense in the sub-sector, bearing in mind the ripple effect a vibrant Akwa Palm Company would have on the economy of the state. The oil palm crop is unique in its endless utility status, having enabled global key players such as Malaysia and Indonesia to go for a zero-waste, income-maximization target by exploring its bottomless end-use potentials.

Development experts agree that given the unfortunate pre-industrial stage of Africa’s development, including that of Akwa Ibom, the productiveness which is both accessible and strategic to us is an agricultural productiveness; which, incidentally, is our area of comparative advantage; and luckily, the “beautiful bride” of the global paradigm-shift in the focus of resource exploitation from a wasting resource to one which is renewable. Interestingly, this is what the governor meant when he talked about a “nexus between agriculture and industrialization” in our opening quote from his foreword to the agric policy document. Sure-foot, then, this governor is – clear-visioned, up-to-date with appropriate research findings and firmly on course!

“He is, indeed,” confirmed Dr. Uduak Charles Udoinyang, a Soil Scientist at the University of Uyo, and the immediate past Commissioner for Agriculture in the state, who has averred that “Governor Emmanuel has let out the genie in the agricultural sector of the economy of the state and things can never be the same again”. He said the governor has uprooted and permanently banished the alibi of impossibility in every sector, particularly in agriculture.

As icing on the cake for this agri-feast and excursion, the state Commissioner for Agriculture and Dean of Commissioners, Dr. (Mrs.) Glory Edet, weighed in with the ebullience and flourish that is uniquely her’s: “it will be difficult to capture all that the governor has done in agriculture in a single interview. Let us simply say that he has laid the foundation for all-round agri-business in the state.”

According to her,“ before now it was thought that tomatoe cannot grow in Akwa Ibom. But at the moment, we harvest an average of a 100 27kg baskets of tomatoes from the government green-house alone weekly. Copying from government green-house technology demonstration, individuals are going into green-house vegetable farming, while other AkwaI bomites are doing open-field tomatoe cultivation with such impressive record of success that the governor is at the moment contemplating a puree (tomotoe paste) industry to circumvent possible glut and wastage occasioned by high tomatoe perishability.”

By the progression of time, it is evening for this very eventful and breath-taking “Udomestication Voyage.” But in tempo of activity, it is yet noon for the administration. “Consolidation” is what it is, going by in-house lingo. This noon looks good to continue well into and beyond 2023 given the many treasure troves Udom is bequeathing to the state.

A sneak-peek into global commerce in palm oil, coconut oil and their down-stream derivatives reveals a cornucopia in which such multinationals as Cargill Inc. of the United States, Wilmar International of Singapore and Sime Darby of Malaysia, etc., are falling over themselves for a bite on the renewable “goldmine” which is all set to replace petroleum.

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. In preparing Akwa Ibom for eventual participation in this evolving global market, Governor Udom Gabriel Emmanuel, is finishing strong; he is casting his agri-legacy in stone.

QUOTE

Governor Emmanuel heralded a revolution in vegetable farming which has come to stay. The value-chain created is one of its kind. The chain includes farms across the state, belonging to 13 forward-looking youths of the one hundred he trained under AKEES, to the popular Ibom Vegetable Inputs Company at No. 500 Oron Road, Uyo; among other agri-allied outfits currently servicing the resultant and ever spiraling cyclone of farm activities