TUC urges FG to invest in agriculture for improved revenue

President of the Trade Union Congress (TUC), Comrade Festus Osifo, has called on the Federal and State Governments to focus on agriculture for improved revenue.

Osifo gave the appeal on Monday during the TUC’s South-West Labour Summit 2025 held in Lagos, with the themed:” Collaborate to Transform: Building Capacity for Regional Excellence and Workers’ Welfare.”

Rather than depending on crude oil production as the mainstay, Osifo urged the government and political leaders to harness or cultivate the nation’s enormous natural resources for improved revenue for national development.

He bemoaned 2025’s N50 trillion national budget, describing it as too low – below $30 billion, when converted to the United States dollar (USD), and compared to budgets of other nations abroad.

He blamed the inability to harness the nation’s potential natural resources to improve the revenue on laziness of the political leaders.

Osifo stressed that Nigeria is a country with vast potential natural resources but left unharnessed.

He cited the example of Netherlands, saying that despite been an island with small sized, generated more money from agriculture, ten times two of the money Nigeria generated from the entire crude production

He said: “Nigeria has a budget of slightly above N50 trillion Naira.
We should never allow the trillions of Naira to keep confusing us, because across the world, there is a common denominator with which we carry our currency, and that is the USD.
“The value of our budget in USD terms in the last 10 years is somewhere around $30 to $35 billion.
“So, why are we really concerned about this? Nigeria as a country, we have our huge potential. We have no business of having a low budget size of $30 to $35 billion.”

“But the reason we have that size of budget is because our political class are relatively lazy. That is the reality because we are largely dependent on crude production.
Most of the governments, not all, but majority of them fold their arms. If you go to some rural local government areas, you will not even see the local government chairman until 20th to 23rd of the month where allocations will be shared,” he said.

“We stated it over and over again that sometime in 2013, that a study was done that if we construct the entire federal road in Nigeria. It’s going to cost $120 billion dollars.
So, if we construct our entire road in Nigeria at the cost $120 billion dollars, and the size of our budget one year is about $30 billion dollars. That means we are going to need four times of our budget to construct our road without paying salaries, without attending to education, without looking at healthcare, without paying pension.
Four times our budget is what we need to construct our road alone,” he said.
He said the theme of the conference was apt, urging members of TUC to take each topic seriously.

“We believe in learning, we believe in unlearning, and we believe in relearning, because that is the only way, as humans, we can grow. That is why, since we came on board, one of the things we’ve done is a strong partnership with Lagos Business School, where we have trained all our head members. Almost all of them attended the training programme.

In their goodwill messages, Commissioner for Establishment and Training in Lagos State, who represented Gov Babajide Sanwo-Olu; Mrs Mayen Badejo from the Federal Ministry of Labour and Productivity; Thompson Akpabio, who represented the Director-General of NECA, charged members of TUC to take the three-day training seriously, learn, unlearn and relearn for better productivity.

They said the conference provided an opportunity to engage, communicate, connect, and then chat a way forward in the world of technology.

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