Nigeria Loses Half Its Harvest to System Failures While GMO Push Ignores the Real Crisis and Forces a False Solution

There is a need to look into more than just the Agricultural sector if we must weather this storm. I’ll speak on a few subjects and I leave it open to correction and contribution.

1.General design of the government, state structure and all ministries.
2. Duty of the senators and house of rep members
3. Duty of everyday Nigerian and farmers

1. The entire design and structure of what we know as Nigeria is a product of the original design for the Pre-colonial Royal Niger Company of 1886. It was based in the Niger region and was designed for resource gathering and slave transport, not governance. It was but one company though in the region but the vision was advanced by the British by algamating completely different and separate regions who only ever related through commerce and marriage in the past and had different laws and systems. Of course these laws and history had to be destroyed or charted away to ease the unification. This new company was called a country and they consolidated control by connecting all the formerly separate regions already converted, conquered and suppressed and all the other smaller communities and regions in between.
We have an entire structural system that was designed in our absense. Our founding fathers were too quick in accepting the old system along with the name and other bindings they received. It was a botched deal from the start and our joy at a taste of freedom and a federation was a sweet smell to mask the bitter taste.

2. The everyday actions of the country are far more important than a president’s duty. The president is mostly tasked with decision making and the weight of these decisions on the countless people under him. The everyday execution of these actions are the duties of every other person that stem down the flow of power. From his vice, to senators, to service chiefs and advisers, inteligence units, senators, governors down to that local government chairman and party ward PRO. We have all forgotten that and someone like Wike can do what he likes while playing roulette with two states, while another former governor plays dice from behind the scene in Edo state. We need to hold the right people accountable. You can’t hold the president but you see your local government chairman everyday, hold him, he will have to hold someone else. Imagine everyone pressure the next person up the chain. It won’t work though because power is fikkle and like in fubara’s situation an unearned right is no right. Outside making sure to create check and balances, gatekeeps, accountability systems if even possible, we may need a rebranding and reelection of accountable people from the grassrot level to the Obeches crown. That brings me to my third context.

3. Our duty as citizens is largely ignored because it’s easier to blame the government and continue in our dubious and nonchalant ways. This is the time for us to band together and take our future by the horn. We speak of things of importance but the youths are gainlessly involved anywhere else but where they are needed. We are kept poor so we spend more time trying to survive and none pondering the state of the country. Street drugs and weed is on the high and appears to be more readily available and cheaper than food, end result, our youth and even children are constantly high and weak, they are on colos and on ice and their lives are on autopilot. Who then would fight and speak for the country like in the days of Obasanji and buhari and even Tinubu. Where are the people brave enough to say it’s enough, high and depressed indoors. It is our duty as a people to reawaken ourself to the fact that we may not have chosen Nigeria the way it is but it is what we have. We can’t dream of regionalizing at this point because it will lead to untold instability for far longer than it will take to fix what we have now. And we cannot presume to want to unite Pan-Africa by dividing its heart. The west created us and even with there design they saw us as of a threat just like most of Africa. We have a duty to wake up, to reteach ourselves what we used to know. How the hausas used to farm as a community and store heaps of groundnut, how the Igbos stored seas of yam in barn for both use and sell far away from there regions. How the Benins and yorubas stored their history in bronze and silver and in face masks and native characters, in songs and dances and all the markings that once littered the great wall of Benin. We have to awaken to who we were and who we have the ability be.

To finish this off I’ll return back to the subject of agriculture and GMO. Amongst many restructuring that may be effected to see effective changes, we may have to look into;

Nationalization and mechanization of agriculture. Have all private sectors invest into the initiative. That way you have igbo men sponsoring hausas men to farm rice and getting there rice rather than importing, a Lagos blue collar worker paying tax to assist the local farmer in ebonyi so that his tomatoes will come cheaper.
Nationalize the mineral and power sectors completely and put them under competent hands to ensure that the surplus supply of fuel we have finds its way to tractors, storage facilities and silos, pumps, transport etc. I keep asking myself, in an oil rich country like we have, what stops crude product from been subsidized for national use by the proceeds of international sale and export. Just asking.
A rigid identification and compliance system will put a small slope to insecurity. It is safe to say that Nigerians insecurity is caused by external influences. With a rigid identification method and a properly integrated system across all institutions and parastatals across the country we can easily flush foreign elements and track migration and mass traveling activities. This would also need a rebranding of the police and security outfit to properly use resources and adhere to strict checks and balances.
Our finance system would need a sweep because we would need a restart as big as recovering ascertaining and documenting the exact amount of cash in supply and financial tokens for internet banking to properly predicte market trends and increase productivity and mitigate large losses by following well vetted numbers. It’s all in the numbers, or lack of numbers as we have.
Our Education has to be revisited and the teaching methods and teaching resources completely thrown out and rebuilt. Our student are fed outdated material and forced obedience and released to wander as corporate empty heads. We need a new learning system aimed at national growth, history preservation, innovation and abstraction, art and story telling, ancient mathematics and new world mathematics, computer and it applications in ways that concur to our values, optimize our work and contributed to integrated productivity in different sectors. None of that rocket science, head in the cloud teaching. No more recycled materials and uncurated information leading to wasted school years. This and many more need to be done in the education sector, not the dastardly age break they are trying to enforce to further stagnate growth and advancement.
The Agricultural sector itself will have to be handled by competent hands, with constantly funded research facilities for studies on news means, methods and applications to better optimize food production not just for profit sake for science sake. Advancing the knowledge of farming used in the past in ways to best suit our climate, soil, market trends, nutrient requirements and the general vision of national growth. If Nigeria is every to use GMO it should be done like every other country, with their own research data, their own seeds as base and proven farming systems and soil profile as exist framework to be advanced on. The introduction of something is dangerous as genetics without complete understanding of it will have more impact on our general state of life in the long run than it will our economy. In addition, the idea of non reusable seet that are privately owned and not tailored for our soil exposes us to a domino series of dependency on foreign pesticides and fertizers to grow them which will only add to the nutrient dragging fixtures of this plants, strong enough to kill weeds, and kill the soil. In 3 seasons we will be needing new versions of these seeds and chemicals for our poison crops to survive.

I close this article on this note, Nigeria needs more than just a president or Peter Obi to change it, it needs the collective decision to create something better out of what we were given. We are cursed with a quiet and distracted youth population but that can change, that will have to change. It’s time we awake to what living our life in the hands of the worse of us and outsiders is going to send a ripple down to all of us and we may need to send that ripple back the other way.
#LetMyPeopleGo