Economic objectives (I)

IN the fifth place, enormous waste and artificial scarcity of food products occur, from time to time, simply because we have no modern storage, processing, transport, and marketing facilities to deal with them in and out of season. This ill must be corrected. In the sixth place, if we are to increase the output of our farm products generally, especially of our export crops, the present yield per acre must be considerably increased. This involves the introduction of higher yielding grains and seeds; more effective control of pests, insects, and plant diseases; the use of fertilizers where necessary; extensive irrigation in certain parts of the country; intensification of extension work; the education of the farmers themselves, practically all of whom are illiterate, to enable them to appreciate, employ, and benefit from modern techniques of farming; and the attraction of educated persons to farming occupation. It must be emphasized that it is idle and unrealistic in the extreme to expect educated persons to embark on a farming career under the present primitive system of cultivation.

In the seventh place, it is now well-known that the chief obstacle to the rapid rate of growth of our economy is agriculture. It constitutes 55 per cent of our gross domestic product, or GDP, and over the period of 1958/59 to 1965/66, it has crawled forward at the average annual rate of 3.3 per cent. This is to be compared and contrasted with manufacture which, over the same period, has been making a leap forward at the annual rate of 9.4 per cent. It is imperative, therefore, that this obstacle to our economic progress must be removed, if we are to achieve the urgently desirable annual growth rate of 10 per cent, which I most seriously advocate. There is nothing extraordinary or unattainable about this rate. Indeed, according to a publication by the Federal Office of Statistics, Lagos, entitled Gross Domestic Product of Nigeria 1958/59-1966/67 not only did we achieve an impressive average annual growth rate of 6.6 per cent in our GDP (excluding oil) over the period covered by this publication, but also in 1960/61 and 1962/63 we scored the high growth rates of 14.0 per cent and 10.5 per cent, respectively.

The FAO Report is an excellent document. But the targets which are set for Nigeria to achieve by 1980 are Lilliputian and uninspiring. Two examples are enough to substantiate this point. Firstly, the FAO envisages that, by 1980, our cotton output would increase by a minimum of 120 per cent, and a maximum of 200 per cent. However, our textile mills are prepared, and can expand sufficiently, within the next two years, to consume an increase of 400 per cent, in order to meet three-fourths of our requirements of textiles. We have the land, and we have the manpower to produce this quantity immediately. But we lack the techniques; and the expected returns from cotton on an acre of land do not provide enough incentive. Secondly, the FAO also envisages that, by 1980, our GDP would climb laboriously to £38 per capita. We can, and should endeavour to achieve more than double this amount by 1980. But this latter target is possible, only if, right now, we bring about an agrarian revolution which will usher in the modernisation of all aspects of our agricultural activities, including the consolidation of small land- holdings in certain parts of the country, and the introduction of co-operative farming, storage, processing, transport and marketing.

For the sake of realistic planning, some of the inescapable results and necessities of the modernization of our agricultural economy must be noted and borne in mind. In the first place, it would be idle and an illusion, and courting a disastrous failure, to embark on the kind of agrarian revolution about which we have been speaking without having an adequate team of suitably qualified extension workers, in addition to equally adequate teams of competent agricultural engineers and managers. In the second place, agricultural modernisation is bound to lead to a considerable reduction in the number of those engaged in farming. Invariably, this has been the outcome of agricultural revolution in other countries. In Britain, for instance, only 3 per cent of the 27 million people who are engaged in civil employment now do farming; as compared with 80 per cent in Nigeria-i.e., 20 million out of our 25 million-strong active labour force. It follows, in the third place, that modernization of agriculture must of a necessity generate considerable expansions in the other five categories of occupation, namely: manufacturing, transport, distributive, banking, and infrastructural occupations which are clearly described at pages 125-127 of The People’s Republic. These expansions are essential in order that those displaced from primary occupation, as a result of agricultural modernization, may be fully absorbed into other gainful employments. In the fourth place, assistance to farmers, under the new agrarian dispensation, will take the forms of (1) technical aid, (2) education in the techniques and management of farming, storage, and marketing, (3) monetary advances on crops, and (4) subsidy.