Proper budget implementation crucial to agriculture development —Makanjuola

  Dr Olusegun Makanjuola, the immediate past General Secretary (South-West), Poultry Association of Nigeria, is the chairman, Global Wyse Limited, an agricultural consultancy firm. He told NURUDEEN ALIMI in this interview reasons budget allocated to agriculture must be properly implemented.

AS a professional and a major stakeholder in the agriculture sector, how would you rate the pace at which agriculture is developing in Nigeria?

I will say for now that there is a tendency that agriculture can develop compared to past one or two decades. The seriousness of the government will have a lot of impact on it, though we still have a lot of way to go in developing agriculture in Nigeria. We do not need to do paper agriculture, we need to do practical agriculture because agriculture is about what you see. If the government can implement most of the policies they showcase agriculture will develop in Nigeria. We need to go back to the days of late Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the way they took agriculture then. We need to thread that path, that time they were establishing farm settlement, they were encouraging graduates and non-graduates. I remember a time when I was in primary school even up to a little part of my secondary school  we were having gardens at the back of our houses. Government should encourage every sector of agriculture by formulating good policies and making funds vailable at reasonable discount rate. All over the world, there are agricultural centres not to be used for industry or residential purposes. If we put all these things together agriculture will develop at a very high speed  because people are now aware that they have to go back to the root, people want to do it but the environment must be very conducive and this is where government need to come in.

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Do you think the budget being allocated to agriculture in Nigeria is sufficient?

I am not always bothered by allocation I am bothered by implementation. No matter how meager that allocation is if it get straight to agriculture there will be significant difference between the current year and the previous. The sincerity of the implementation of such figure, what are the things they put those figures on that they want to implement? If they do it to letters, this time around it is not a matter of doing 80 per cent or 90 per cent whatever the figure is let it be utilised appropriately. When you say money should get to the farmers to cultivate rice if it is 10 or 5 per cent of the budget let it get to the rice farmers. Many people want to bring in investors but investors want to see what is on ground, when they now compare our budget to implementation they are always scared because when the implementation failed the government will now resorted to importation again. So if an investor had invested his money in cultivation by the time they are importing his products will be rendered useless. Let them implement what is in the budget to letters and I know farmers will so much appreciate it and by doing so our agricultural sector will grow.

You own an agriculture company, what role is your company playing in the development of agriculture which is a very important sector of the economy?

We do a lot of things in my company and one of them is that we train people. We train not only farmers, we train from the cradles by going to high institution of learning such as the colleges of agriculture, vetrenary colleges, department of animal sciences of some universities to tap these young future farmers. The training is tailored towards agricultural development. We mentor people as matter of fact now we are coaching. Coaching is more expensive than mentoring and apart from that we consult for farmers we supervise farming projects and we come up with innovative products to help agricultural practices.