THOMAS ETUH AND RENEWED HOPE

  Etuh is quietly helping to expand the frontiers of agriculture, reckons ABDUL SHINKAFI

One of the promises of President Bola Tinubu as he pursues his Renewed Hope agenda is to scale up productive activities in agriculture. Many experts are with the President on this. They argue that one of the most effective ways to boost food security and tame consumer price inflation is to enhance local produce in agriculture and advance the entire agriculture value chain.

If this is true, and of course it is, then President Tinubu should engage, passively and actively, the services and advisories of Thomas Etuh, a man deep in agriculture and allied matters in the agriculture ecosystem. Etuh has been involved, behind the scene, in the promotion of the nation’s agro-economy to the acknowledgment of farmers across the country, particularly commercial farmers in the north. The average commercial farmer wants ease-of-doing farming. Farmers want improved crop yield, better farming implements and overall healthy harvest. Whether it is poultry, pastoral farming, fishery or crop farming, the bottomline for the modern farmer is high yield at harvest time.

This is what Etuh has been involved in for many decades, quietly helping to expand the frontiers of agriculture through his TAK group, an active player in fertilizer production and distribution. Recently, he was appointed the Chairman of Notore Chemicals. With parent company in Mauritius, Notore operates the only urea fertiliser plant in sub-Saharan Africa. And it has played and continues to play critical roles in championing the African Green Revolution.

As the new man at the helm of Notore, Etuh is now at a vantage position to influence farming in Nigeria on a larger dimension. The former Unity Bank and Veritas Kapital Assurance Chairman, is well primed for his new role at the fertilizer and allied chemicals conglomerate.

Nigeria has a landmass of about 923,769 square kilometres and a population of over 200 million. In 2021, Nigeria’s arable land area was put at roughly 36.9 million hectares, the largest in Africa, followed by Sudan, Niger and Ethiopia. Note that arable land is not agricultural land. Arable land is the portion of land already being cultivated from season to season. It is a fraction of agricultural land which is the total land area that could be used for agriculture. This includes the non-cultivated land area. Sudan has the largest agricultural land area in Africa but a huge part of such land is not put to use.

A good 6.6 million hectares of Nigeria’s land were said to be under permanent crops, while 25.2 million hectares were under permanent meadows and pastures.

Now compare with Europe and European nations where Nigeria and other African countries import food including grains from.

By 2020, Europe was reported to have, cumulatively, about 157.4 million hectares of land devoted for agricultural production. Out of this, 98.1 million hectares were used as arable land (the equivalent of 62 % of the utilised agricultural area), 48.0 million hectares as permanent grassland, 11.1 million hectares for permanent crops, with the remainder used for kitchen gardens.

In contrast, Africa dwarfs Europe in terms of natural resources including arable land. But Africa is dependent on Europe for farm produce including wheat, maize, rice, among others. Africa’s huge water bodies notwithstanding, the continent still depends on Europe for sea food as she does on Asia and the Americas for grains, especially rice. The question arises, why is Nigeria, nay Africa, unable to feed herself? The answer is the inability of African leaders to forge an effective public-private partnership with their farmers. The nation that has achieved huge success in agriculture with evidence of export and internal food security is one that has grossly subsidised agriculture through the local farmers. For far too long, Nigerian leaders have paid lip service to agriculture. In some cases, a critical resource like fertiliser is politicised. Rather than ensure its distribution through appropriate channels to legitimate farmers, fertilisers are turned into political tools distributed through politicians to phony farmers.

This is the path mostly trodden in the past. It’s a path never to be taken by President Tinubu. In his New Year message, the President demonstrated ambition in his quest to wheel Nigeria to the umbra of food security. He said his government will cultivate 500,000 hectares of farmland to grow major staple crops across the country in addition to other stop gap efforts to ensure stable food supply to Nigerian homes.

 His exact words: “To ensure constant food supply, security and affordability, we will step up our plan to cultivate 500,000 hectares of farmlands across the country to grow maize, rice, wheat, millet and other staple crops.”

In November last year, the Tinubu government launched the dry season farming with 120,000 hectares of land in Jigawa State under the National Wheat Development Programme. The result of this collaboration between the federal government and Jigawa state government will start manifesting this year.

But beyond these initiatives, what Tinubu needs the most is a working partnership with the private sector, especially stakeholders like Etuh who have had a long history in the nation’s agro-economy. Tinubu, from his body language, wants to make a mark in agriculture. He wants to excel where his predecessors failed. To achieve this ambition, he would need a non-partisan advisory council populated by the likes of Etuh, Kolawole Adeniji of Niji Farms, M.D Abubakar of L & Z Integrated Farms, Kola Masha of Babban Gona, ranked as one of the world’s largest farming marketplaces with over 140,000 acres of maize farms and over 80,000 member-farmers in Nigeria, among others. These are private sector players in the agriculture ecosystem.

Tinubu’s Renewed Hope vision in agriculture needs the vast experience of stakeholders of Etuh’s pedigree. Over the years, the Kogi-born banker, entrepreneur and value chain service provider in the agro-industry has patriotically and silently played a catalytic role to feed the Nigerian population without drawing attention to himself. Such a patriot that prefers to create value without seeking public adulation does not deserve the recent media onslaught against his character. The media campaign to smear his reputation with regard to his leadership at Unity Bank was exactly what it is: a campaign of calumny said to have been orchestrated by those who are uncomfortable with his rising profile as a symbol of nationalism and patriotism.

Farmers in the north greatly esteem his contributions to the deepening of agriculture over the past years. If the government wants to achieve food security, it’s to people like Etuh that it should partner with for very obvious reasons: They will not play politics with farming; they will work to preserve their reputation and they will deliver the food security component of Renewed Hope vision.

Shinkafi, an agronomist, writes from Sokoto