National Centre for Agricultural Mechanization’s Executive Director, Dr. (Engr AR Gamal and his team of agric engineers have kept the ball rolling. It doesn’t matter that the federal government just dusted up a report where some outsiders sealed the fate of which federal agencies to scrap or merge. But what becomes of the flywheel of Nigeria’s transition from subsistence farming to mechanized drive for food security? Director of Engineering, NCAM, Dr O.A Ogunjirin speaks with WorldStage Newsonline. Excerpt by Segun Otokiti
How do you feel about the federal government’s ongoing move to implement the Steve Orosanye’s report on civil service reform that recommended merger of some government agencies, particularly given the unique nature of your institution’s operations in the agricultural sector?
The Orosanye report dates back to 2012. As at then, we have around 900 agencies. Today, I think we have over 2000. If we actually want to conserve spending, why did we create additional agencies? If we are to merge (you don’t merge wood and metal together in engineering), then you have to weld metal to metal. That’s when they fuse. When you want to do this kind of thing you should bring professionals in, not just administrators. It is not that I am against merging. But merge the right parts together for optimal performance. NASENI has its own mandate, for instance, and it is conspicuously different from NCAM’s. Ours starts from mechanizing the Nigerian agricultural system from land development to packaging. The National Centre for Agricultural Mechanization (NCAM) is set up to have enough food and fibre for the populace. From its own definition, the National Agency for Science and Engineering Infrastructure (NASENI), you will see the difference in the mandates. If you want efficiency in a system, it’s even better you separate the components so you can measure performance.
When you manufacture all these, how far do they go?
A good hospital doesn’t need any advertisement. Those already well treated will tell others. Just recently, we came up with a very efficient thresher. Somebody came here, and said they looked everywhere for a thresher everywhere, and the best they could get from Ofa was one that could thresh 5 tons per day. Here we have developed one that could do 1.5 tons per hour. The man took our thresher to his farm, and we seized the opportunity to evaluate it. My staff stationed there told me the man was dancing when he saw its operation; he never believed this could come from Nigeria. They got up to 20 tons per day. And he told me personally he was going to buy our thresher. He said he had a combine harvester which he would come and dump here—that if we could do this, we could copy that too. That is reverse engineering. If he had not benefitted from what we do, he would not have make such comment. He so much believed in us he said we could copy a combine harvester. We keep developing every day. This centre has the largest pool of agriculture engineers in the whole country—soil, water, processing, farm power, environment, structure and so on. The establishment of NCAM is not political. They went round the whole country before they chose this place. We are sitting on 1000 hectares of land here. Every type of soil across the nation is represented here. This year we are opening our farm village to use our equipment to farm. We will research the ideas we come across in the value chain as we go. That is what we do here.
Could they be contemplating this merger because you are doing this much, but the authorities don’t get feedback?
We attend exhibitions and shows. I think in the last four editions, NCAM has consistently come first. We came first among all the research institutes in Nigeria last year. The records are there. We don’t organize the award programmes. These are indications we are doing well, busy churning out machinery. As for the extension of this technology to everybody—if we are empowered, we will do more. That is why we go to exhibition. We went to Kwara last year for exhibition. They were surprised we produced those technologies in Nigeria. We have produced heap makers, winnowers for our women most whom are still using wind. We have planters for maize, cassava, self-driven planters, motorized. Our senators could make these technologies their constituency projects. Governor Zulum has been here. I am not surprised when he said NCAM should not be merged. That is a voice of reason from a first-hand informant.
The agric minister was talking of the need for Nigeria to acquire 70, 000 tractors to meet food security target. Do you mass-produce here?
Tractorization is not Mechanization. They are two different things. Tractorization is making available the use of tractors—not only on farms. Tractor could be used to carry out processing. That is why we say you should standardize the kind of tractors you are bringing in to the country. Our ministry is doing well. We are only saying if we are importing five brands of tractors, let them invite the manufacturers to have plants in Nigeria. That is what Myanmar did with their power tillers. They never had that technology. So they invited the Chinese manufacturer to set up a plant in Myanmar. By that, technology transfer took place, and their people took over the plant. That is what we are saying here about standardization. It will generate employment for assemblers, mechanics, and all that. You can’t just be bringing in tractors. There is a brand they bring in that doesn’t last for more than three years. Its injector, costing about N900,000 , and our kind of fuel don’t work together. Yet a tractor is supposed to outlive the owner. That is why we have a lot of tractors parked up. We don’t even have tractor drivers in Nigeria. Most of them are car drivers. And a car driver will damage a tractor. These people ought to be trained in the technical area because you need a tractor to do more than farm operation. And there are no facilities to conduct practical training for them in any of those universities in Nigeria. But we have it in this centre. Just as we take on thousands of IT students annually to also give them practical experience.
Are there other centres that produce machinery like NCAM does?
Yes. But their mandates are different; they are subsets of NCAM’s mandate. Look at the Project Development Agency (PRODA), for instance. They produce garri , ethanol, and other processing technologies. Processing is a subset of mechanization. But our mandate is all-encompassing.
What other challenges have you been facing?
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 right way to go.
Aren’t you under any monitoring agency?
We are under the federal ministry of agriculture and food security, and the Agricultural Research Council of Nigeria (ARCN). They know what we do, and we are the bride of the ARCN.
Is your manufacturing 100 percent local?
We go into what we call adaptive research in some cases. We know somebody is involved in certain activity in a particular country, and he is coming up with something. Let’s get it. We look at it. We apply it. Does it need modification? We call it reverse engineering. We know threshing is carrying paddy rice, beating it, and separating 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.
How do you get patronage?
You know what we do basically is identify needs, research them, come up with solutions, and produce the machines that will address the agricultural needs identified. Our mandate says we should call in the agriculture equipment manufacturers, train them, and release it to them for mass production. With that, the technology will be growing. The Agricultural Machinery and Equipment Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (AMEMAN) are all over Nigeria. And we have a good relationship with them. We do the research, and they supply their localities.
Does NCAM mandate cover storage too?
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 facilities developed here. If I want to store maize now, I won’t harvest it and keep it in the barn. I must dry it 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: just blow hot air into a chamber, you get your produce dried.
Why do we still have food crisis when you are doing this much in Nigeria?
Food crisis starts from insecurity. You will observe Nigeria has never been in this kind of food crisis we are in now. The cause is insecurity—not mechanization. If we don’t check it, we won’t survive in this country. If someone kills your tractor operator, will the tractor operate itself? A farmer came here to tell me his ordeal with herders. Their animals came to his farm, and ate up all the crops. I said farms should now 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 money in two years.
You have input in storage, how about wastage arising between farm and market?
All the produce have mechanization input that won’t allow it to go to waste. Pressure and bad road damage it. But some people now have produced crates like that of beverages in which you can transport your produce, like tomatoes, for instance. And when you have a good road network, you can easily get your produce to your destination within a short period. You don’t spend 24 hours on the road. You can also process it. That is why we have tomato paste, dry okra, mango chips, and dried tantashe. I know somebody who processes this, and exports it to Europe. You can do dry season farming, too, with irrigation—like they do in Jigawa. We harvested fresh maize here last week. So in a cycle you have three harvests. Agriculture is the only profession that can employ 150 million Nigerians—if we take it as a business. The state governments should even kick-start it, not the federal government. They own the land. Let them make it available and well developed with irrigation facilities. When you develop that, civil servants will want to farm. Everybody will want to farm. People, not government, will set up processing plants because they know there is enough raw materials. And people will stop looking for white-collar jobs. Only 4 percent of North America produce the food the whole world, not just America, eats. Go from Minneapolis to Nebraska. You will see farms. And they take care of their farmers over there. They make agencies like NCAM service them. So merging NCAM with others is an aberration. It is like killing our agricultural system. Kenya, Japan, Tanzania, Egypt have institutions like NCAM. And their governments support them. In China, institutes like ours are already awarding PhD. We are not there yet, but we have the facilities, manpower, and institutional connection. We need government to make this place more functional. We produce tractors, planters, fertilizer applicators, and weeders. Our executive director just looks at the problem, and asks us to solve it. That is how we operate here.
Do we have machines that can improve our rice, heavy and sandy as many complain, to global standards?
We have what we call morphological properties of farm produce. Japanese rice, for instance, is planted in Japan, and for Japan. It is very proteinous. If you plant it here, it will fail. We have own ofada, one of the most proteinous in the world. You will agree with me stones don’t grow with rice. The problem is in the handling. We need to mechanize the process so they don’t harvest manually, and stop threshing on the floor. That is why you see us producing huggers, cutters, and so on. They will reduce the levels of impurity. Let me shock you. Ask for a rice de-stoner in Japan. They will give you a machine that removes stones from the field. It never occurs to them stones can ever get into rice processing. If we train our farmers on handling, we eliminate some machines like de-stoners. People will start improving. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Just like we started with developing our technologies, and now we are moving to standardizing them. We are struggling to do that, though. We need a design studio which we are trying to set up. There we’ll do component standardization and Bill of Quantity with AutoCad and others.. That is why we need to be a stand-alone institution. We have 1000 hectares here for practicals. Our student will be practicing mechanization in their area of specialization here.
Benue is usually associated with much farm produce with so much of it going to waste. How can NCAM help?
We need to intervene in processing. But they have not produced enough. Because a lot of what they produce goes to waste, we think they are producing so much. If they try to eat only what they produce in the state, they will go hungry. They don’t have processing facilities; that is why so much gets wasted. But if u have a technology that stores raw yam for six months, you can even export yam after you make your yam flour and pondo . But we are not producing enough. Insecurity has only exposed us—that we rely on this subsistence farmers. No large scale farming. So Benue should consider processing and marketing. Yes—marketing. That department recently trained women to convert cassava to flour for baking bread, chin-chin, and cakes. No mixture.
You don’t want to blow your trumpet. But how do people out there know about your work so they can rise in your defence now?
I just told you Governor Zulum was here. Fortunately, he is a professor agric mechanization. And NCAM is national. You can’t fiddle with it. Our forefathers saw the need to create it. We have here in this centre the headquarters of the Nigerian Institution of Agricultural Engineers. It’s also the headquarters of the International Soil Tillage Research Organisations. So it is not like we don’t project our works. We go to shows and exhibitions. But the government has to formulate policies that will make people fall in love with mechanization. And that will make them know us more. Again, they must stop the indiscriminate import of farm machines. I think the government should place a tariff on the tractor importation; let 2 percent of it go to NCAM. With that, the government doesn’t have to fund us. We will have more than enough. We will have outreach offices.
Does the FG resort to you when buying tractors?
The federal government won’t buy tractors without coming to us. But individuals and state governments just go and import. Ask them: Have they done the environmental assessment? No. You need agric engineers to guide you. The contractors do that. Of course anybody can import tractors and other machine. A governor in this country once did that: he imported three-cylinder tractors. And here in Nigeria our soil density is very high. Till today you can’t locate the tractors. I told you earlier: a tractor is supposed to outlive you. That is why we will always have shortage of farm implement. No repairs. No spare parts. Three things are responsible: management, fuel consumption, and maintenance. You should consult the right offices before you acquire farm machines. That way, you have quality tractors on the ground. And we will be able to tell the so-called contractors to bring the spare parts—or you want the buyers to be importing things like fuel filters? When you go through NCAM, we will tell your manufacturers 25 percent of the spare parts should come with this machine importation. And we will know if the manufacturers will have to establish an assembling plant here, and train mechanics and operators. We will enter into agreement with them, and follow it up. Why do you need a four-wheel drive when a two-wheel type can do it? Not only tractors, but processing and storage machines, too. You can bring anything in. But let s certify it is good for our system.
Do you have any relationship with the IITA?
Yes, we do. Their director-general there visited us last year. He was shocked too the way he talked. He said they had to collaborate with us.
