How IITA, Makinde connected with Awolowo’s Fasola Farms

By Festus Adedayo

As Nigerians visualized the 1960 date of independence from afar, subsistence farmers were bothered about carrying over the pains of farming. Being a labour-intensive engagement, virtually all aspects of subsistence agriculture were laced with drudgery. Of greater pain for young offspring of farmers was the unfavourable tag placed on them as rural, backward and inhabitants of the Dark Age. Between 1953 and 1959 when he was Premier, Obafemi Awolowo sought to lessen these pains and convey to Western Region farmers that they were indeed kings of the economy.

Awolowo’s Administration, in doing this, launched a five-year development plan, with agriculture index high on the card. Officials were sent to Israel to understudy the Moshav agricultural development scheme, the report of which led to the establishment of 20 farm settlements and five institutes in the Western Region. One of them was the Fasola Farms located on the outskirts of the ancient city of Oyo.

The International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, (IITA) with its headquarters in Ibadan, Oyo State, took it upon itself to begin where Awolowo stopped, with a programme aimed at directing the youth towards productive career pathways in agriculture and business and respond to the needs of students in redirecting their aspirations towards modern agriculture. The rationale is that, agriculture must be the engine of future economic growth in Africa. With a scheme it tagged Start Them Early Program (STEP) which came out of a group of Congolese youth (NewDay Afrika) who participated in the IITA @50 exhibition in 2017, led by Prince Bobo Tangabanga, STEP is a new youth program through which IITA is seeking a reintroduction of a consciousness for agriculture, with a vision of continent-wide scaling of advance agribusiness development in secondary schools. Its major driver is Dr. Nteranya Sanginga, IITA’s Director General who, in Kigali, Rwanda, while receiving the 2018 distinguished Africa Food Prize for demonstrated innovations to improve “food security” in Africa, with $100,000 won by his institute, publicly announced that this prize would be deployed into a youth agripreneur project.

IITA’s intervention in those schools is total. With the deplorable nature of many schools in Nigeria, STEP chose to upgrade the existing infrastructure. It provided the schools ICT equipment, set up computer workstations, so as to strengthen ICT use and facilitate training of both the school teachers and students. The sole objective was for students and teachers to use ICT in agriculture. The equipment provided are, desktop computers and laptops, security locks, internet facilities (with good bandwidth), projectors, printers and learning materials. The computers are also equipped with training manuals and curriculum to be used.

This reporter was at Fasola Grammar School, one of the three pilot schools. Established in 1980 by the Bola Ige administration in the state, the school was literally in ruins. Many classes had no windows and asbestos were falling off and the floors were like excavated mounds of heaps. Today, the school has become a fascinating model, not only in convincing school children that a rewarding prospect awaits a career in agriculture but that school children can study in a proper, conducive environment with all the facilities that make studies seamless.

IITA, in achieving its pilot STEP programme goals, literally brought Fasola back from ruins. Its first concentration was on infrastructural development in host schools, as part of the reorientation process. Dilapidated roofs were replaced with modern ones, collapsed asbestos gave way to modern PVCs, surrounding floors paved with modern stones and Fasola classrooms now favourably compete with anyone anywhere in the world. As students resumed during the week, they would marvel at the complete transformation of their school. It now has a newly built school hall, tiled and equipped with all the facilities that could sit the student population. The hall can also serve as venue for town hall meetings of the Fasola community who could pay the school to use the refurbished hall. Classrooms now don tiled floors, electronic boards and equipped with good looking chairs and tables. The institute constructed a modern toilet, a school hall and totally refurbished the school’s laboratory, modeling it after that of the University of Ibadan and replacing old disused reagents that had been there in the last 25 years, with new ones. It also made available to it processing facilities, chairs and ICT tools. This is in addition to the microscopes it procured for the lab which the school had never seen in its 40 years of existence. Teachers and principal’s offices were also totally refurbished and equipped with befitting tables, chairs and other amenities.

The above seem inconsequential compared to the modern agricultural facilities brought to the school by IITA. One is an agricultural building which was commissioned by the Oyo State governor on July 23, 2020. It serves as the practical hall where the students demonstrate the value addition of agriculture by processing cassava products into cassava bread, tidbits, soya milk from their own planted soya beans, smoothies from fruits, cassava doughnuts, among others. Samuel Esther, a Senior Secondary School 1 student explained what Fasola students do in this building. They were seen busy processing all these cassava products themselves. Offering advanced impetus to them was a student of Agricultural Economics from LAUTECH, Rukayat Opeyemi.

The major effort of IITA’s STEP in Fasola is the agricultural mechanization consciousness it is bringing to the students, to clear their minds of the punishing picture of agriculture they had from the daily drudgeries of their parents on the farm. This reporter went to the school’s expansive crop production farm anchored by the students. Kitted in their green overalls, black farm jackboots and helmets, the students – boys and girls – cut the picture of the Nigerian farmer of tomorrow. Samuel Joshua, a Kebbi State indigene student of the school in SS2, did the talking. He and his colleagues, he said, had been trained on mechanization farming. IITA gave the school a planting machine, harvester and insecticide spraying machine, among others.

“We spend two to three days to prepare an acre now and within an hour, the land is cleared. Farming is made easy and we have more yield,” said Joshua who said that, until now, he projected to study Marine Engineering but had changed his life ambition to studying agriculture in the university.

A big poultry pen was also constructed for the students whose daily schedules are woven round the feeding of chickens, picking the eggs and general maintenance of the pen. The reporter was told that Fasola has been selling the eggs to customers who come to the agricultural village from places as far as Lagos and Ibadan. Joseph Ojo Isaac, who hails from Oyo town and Maryam Addeleke, both JSS1 students, are two of the students in this poultry section. Adeleke even said that she was poised to start a poultry farm of her own.

A big greenhouse for vegetable production is also one of the features of the STEP programme for Fasola. According to the students and the STEP team spoken to, the vegetable harvested from the greenhouse are solely targeted at the Fasola community who troop down to the school to purchase their vegetables. Alimi Abdulazeez, who hails from Osun State and Taofeek Adekunle, are two of the students manning this greenhouse. Adeleke, whose parents are farmers, from the words of the STEP team, is “one of the most highly dedicated students” who are committed to the agricultural ideal in the school. When interviewed, he told Saturday Tribune that, with the knowledge he had gathered, he could have his own vegetable farm. The team said that after the recent cultivation of the vegetables in the greenhouse and they proposed to move Adeleke to another section on the farm, he resisted, insisting on gathering more knowledge about vegetable farming.

One other innovation in Fasola by IITA is the biogas project located in the school. An integrated farming technique, with the aid of cow dung and poultry droppings picked from the school farm and a machine for turning wastes into gas, the gas from the biogas machine is piped to the science laboratory where it is used. The borehole dug by the institute for the school also serves as a social benefit interface between the school and the community, with kids and women coming into Fasola to fetch water for their use. Ancillary facilities provided by the institute for Fasola include 28 electricity polls and perimeter fencing of the school. The reporter came out with the impression that the STEP vision, at its pilot school, is changing the mindset of young people about agriculture, that the ancient engagement is not punishment, it is business.

Perhaps in the cumulative effects of this STEP pilot scheme can be found the success of this IITA dream. Upon being invited to launch the project, Oyo State governor, Engr. Seyi Makinde, immediately keyed into it as a boost for his agricultural dream for his state. Makinde immediately discussed how STEP could become a partnership between the institute and Oyo State, with a provision for scaling the Fasola experiment to the six geopolitical zones in Oyo state; one school per zone. It was gathered that the Oyo State government has made available the sum of $1.2m for the partnership. This is going to be done in conjunction with President Obasanjo, patron of the institute and the African Development Bank Governor, Akinwumi Adesina, whose bank has provided many interventional initiatives for IITA. Not only did the Oyo government take over the completion of the only dilapidated building left in the school, the governor reportedly immediately summoned the Commissioner for Education to use the furniture procured by IITA for Fasola as model for schools in the state.

“We remain steadfast in our resolve to grow our economy through agribusiness. This project that is starting in Fasola Grammar School will have a new generation of Agripreneurs in Oyo State,” the governor said during the commissioning.

One other effect of STEP in Fasola, according to information gathered, is the scaling up of its enrolment from 292 to 396 students, bringing out of school children into schooling loop. The collaboration of Sanginga, a man nicknamed “Father of STEP” by the students, Governor Makinde, Obasanjo and Adesina would no doubt impact students, communities and Africa in the coming years.

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