WorldStage Newsonline– As Nigeria is currently in head on collision with economic/social hardship as well as the challenges of implementing the Steve Oronsaye’s report on civil service reform, the leadership of the National Centre for Agriculture Mechanization (NCAM) has chipped in its opinion on how the country can overcome the problems.
Dr. Ogunjirin, Director of Engineering, who stood in for the Executive Director of the centre, Dr. A.R. Gamal, in an interview with WorldStage stated that the nation’s agricultural sector had the capacity to employ about 150 million Nigerians if an institution as NCAM was adequately supported, allowed to stand on its own and empowered rather than merged with other agricultural institution(s).
Besides, he noted that for the agricultural sector to attain the level of attraction to the general public and consequently induce mass production of food items the state governments must play the lead role by kick-starting it.
Explaining how state governments’ intervention will take the country out of the challenge of food insufficiency, Ogunjirin said: “The state government should kick start it, not the federal government. They own the land. Make it available and well developed with irrigation facilities. When you develop that, civil servants will want to farm, everybody will want to farm. And when we have enough, people, not government, will set up processing plants because they know there is money to be made there. And people will stop looking at white-collar jobs.
“Only 4% of North America produce the food for the whole world, not just America. Go from Minneapolis to Nebraska, you will see farms. And they take care of their farmers. They make agencies like NCAM to service them.
“So merging NCAM is aberration. It is like killing our agricultural systems. Kenya, Japan, Egypt have institutions like NCAM. And they support them. In China, institutes like ours are already awarding PhD. We should be empowered better—not to merge. We produce tractors, planters, fertilizers applicators, weeders. Our executive director just looks at the problem, and asks us to solve it. That’s what makes us tick and different.”
According to Ogunjirin, NCAM is positioned to address the mechanization needs of Nigeria’s agriculture saying “we adopt, we adapt, we relate well with other international bodies—in Japan, Kenya, Egypt, China (CAM), Turkey. So if you merge us, how will they relate with us again?”
Asked about the prevalent food crisis in the land in spite of his claim that NCAM is up to the task, he said the crisis was a result of insecurity, asserting that Nigeria had never been in the kind of present food crisis situation but for the crime and insurgency-induced insecurity, and not mechanization problem.
“Food crisis start from insecurity. You will observe Nigeria has never been in this kind of food crisis we have now. The problem is insecurity—not mechanization. If we don’t check it, we won’t survive in this country. If someone kill your tractor operator, will the tractor operate itself,” he stated.
Continuing, he said: “A farmer came here to tell me his ordeal with herders. The animals came to his farm and ate up all the crops. I then advised farms should be cited around town. When he told me his farm is around the police station at Zulu, I couldn’t talk again. He is now thinking of buying a thresher to render services to people. I told him he will recoup his profit in two years.”
He also spoke on how the center functioned to catalyze agricultural activities in the country as he explained that the centre, as practice, always went into adaptive research in some cases by finding those involved in certain mechanized agricultural activities in a particular country and advancing on them.
“We look at it. We apply it. Does it need modification? We call it reverse engineering. We know threshing is carrying paddy, beat it, and separate it. So when you make a machine to do this, that’s mechanization. We have a motorized winnower that uses petrol, and can winnow more than 2 tons,” Ogunjirin said further about the centre’s pre-occupation.
Taken up on the challenge that lack of storage facilities posed to food availability and supply chain in the country, he admitted that storage was part of agricultural mechanization but that farmers themselves were not even operating effectively enough with available methods of preserving agricultural produce to secure the ones being produced.
“Yes. It is holistic. And storage is part of agricultural mechanization. You have to be sure your produce is storable before you store it. We have some storage facility developed here. If I want to store maize, I won’t harvest it and keep t in the barn. I must dry to some safe-moisture level, not the way our aged parents did. We have dryers: solar, charcoal-fired, electric, gas-fired. It’s no rocket science. Blow hot air into a chamber, you get your produce dried,” Engr. Ogunjirin explained further.
He said waste of food items in the country was not only because of lack of storage facilities but also because of bad roads that prolonged delivery time of agricultural produce to where they were needed as well as the damage caused to the items while drivers of vehicles conveying them were trying meander bad spots on those roads.
Speaking more on the storage challenge, he said: “There are crops mechanization processes that won’t allow agricultural produce to waste, however pressure and bad roads cause this waste. We have crate like that of beverages I which you can transport your tomato. When you have a good road network, you can easily get your produce to your destination within a short period.
“You don’t spend hours on the road. And we have dryers that you can also use to process your produce. That is why we have tomato paste, dry okra, mango chip, dry tantashe etc. I know somebody who processes this and exports to Europe. You can do dry season farming too with irrigation—like we do here with maize— so that in a cycle you can have three harvests.”
While he applauded the federal government for trying her best in the area of funding he however appealed to it to let the centre be.
“Sincerely speaking, the government is trying in funding. But they should let NCAM be so we can continue to deliver on our mandate. Not because I am here today. But that is the way to go,” he said.
