Boko Haram: Borno spends N50bn to revive agric

Borno State government has invested about 50 billion naira within the last fiscal year to give a boost to the agriculture sector in order to increase food sufficiency for the insurgency battered people of the state.

Commissioner for Agriculture, Alhaji Mohmmed Dili, who spoke exclusively with the Nigerian Tribune recently, noted that inspite of insurgency, some form of subsistence farming has been going on in portions of the northern  central and most parts of southern Borno.

2012, 2013 and 2014 were some of the most vulnerable of the eight-year insurgency war in which most farmers, herdsmen and fishermen coupled with the Lake Chad institutions went comatose because of fear of being killed in the fields.

According to Dili, almost every part of the state was affected by insurgency yet the people of some of the local government areas braved it to farm during the last farming season giving rise to a bumper harvest during the 2016 farming season.

The advent of insurgency, however, did not stop the government from investing in the sector which now has “ten Dando rigs” a specialised equipment which can drill up to 1.5 kilometers down to source for water in any of the three savannah regions present in the state.

This, according to Dili, is a great achievement, adding that no farmer had any excuse of lack of water for his crops this year, even during the dry season when temperatures rise beyond fourty five degrees Celsius and scorch the soil and discourage dry season farming.

The commissioner hinted that the Sahel, Sudan and Guinea Savannah were the most difficult to get water for serious farming in the north as such, the massive purchase of these rigs from the British would go a long way in opening up the irrigational space in the state.

According to Dili, “Borno state has a large underground source of water from Gajigana up to Niger Republic and it is our intentions to tap into this enormous  resource for the growth of the agro sector” he revealed.

“With the rigs ready to work, we are about to select 10,000 units of irrigation farming families to key into the irrigation method which is the only future for the state to produce more food

“We will give each family a large chunk of land since we have a thousand tractors ready to work for them at seven thousand naira a day to bring back the glory of agriculture to the state and empower the people who are mostly  farmers.

“As I speak, we have a thousand, five hundred planters, six hundred rice mills, and have made plans for the setting up of twenty oil mill with a capacity of a hundred and twenty tonnes at six tonnes of oil per hour.”

Apart from vegetable oil factories which would be extracting oil from ground nut and some oil related vegetables, Dili revealed that the state government would soon commence a chips making factory.

The commissioner also revealed that Governor Kashim Shettima was trying his best to move the state from the ashes of insurgency to the highest producer of groundnut in the country as it was before the unfortunate advent of Boko Haram which burnt down farms as part of its trade mark.

On the number of farmers killed by the terrorists, the commissioner said that, ninety per cent of the people wasted by Boko Haram were farmers which was why it was almost impossible to start taking a separate statistics on how many farmers died.

From Ganze to Gubio, Magumeri, Jere, Konduga, Kukawa, Ngala, Baga, Mafa almost all the local governments suffered form the action of the insurgents who sometimes burnt down their farms like they did to the former Chief of Gwoza Alhaji Timta who was a serious  farmer before he bowed to their bullets.

Borno and Yobe states are the major producers of seventy five percent of the brown beans in Nigeria, and the southern part of Borno have already started planting the special variety this farming season unlike northern Borno where many farmers are still scared to go out.

Hundreds of tonnes of groundnuts and vegetables like carrots and cabbages which are grown in Jere local government area have already been planted in demarcated safe areas.