Copyright thenationonlineng
It is unimaginable that vital agric equip are gathering dust for months over sharing formula When President Bola Ahmed Tinubu launched the Renewed Hope Agricultural Mechanisation Programme, hopes were high that the drudgery that had hitherto attended farming operations and, by extension, productivity, will soon be consigned to the past. In what he described as a ‘bold step towards achieving complete agricultural independence’, and to make agriculture more attractive to our youths”, the president had on the occasion unveiled 2,000 tractors, 2,000 disc ploughs and harrows, 1,000 disc ridgers, 1,200 tractor-trailers, 500 seed drills, 300 boom sprayers, 10 harvesters, and 12 mobile workshop vehicles, among other spare parts. The equipment, he had also announced ‘would be deployed nationwide to empower service providers, enable year-round cultivation, and create jobs, particularly for young Nigerians’. That was on June 23. Four months after, not only are the equipment reportedly gathering dust at the headquarters of the National Agricultural Seed Council (NASC) in Abuja, the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security, under whose purview the deployment is claims to be awaiting directives from the Presidency on the modalities for distributing the farm implements! The agriculture and food security minister, Abubakar Kyari, who received the implements in February, had, at the time proposed three models to ensure accessibility and maximise their impact on agriculture. The first was to allow individuals and organisations to purchase the tractors outright; the second involves leasing under which the farmers would have been able to access tractors without full upfront costs of ownership, and the third, setting up tractor service centres within farming communities, to enable small holder farmers to rent tractors as needed for their operations. Our initial understanding at the time was that the minister already had sufficient clarity on what needed to be done and therefore only needed ample time to work out the preferred option with, perhaps, the concurrence of the Federal Executive Council coming after. We consider it unimaginable that this simple process will require the whole of four months and still counting! Worse is that there are still no indications that the ministry actually shares the sense of urgency let alone the national imperative that underlay the initiative. As if that is not bad enough, ‘The Guardian’, quoting an unnamed source within the agriculture ministry, claims that the ministry had yet to begin distribution due to delays in approving the sharing formula. The newspaper would in the same breath quote another official as claiming that the ministry officials have little information about the planned deployment of the tractors aside from what is known at the Presidency. Read Also: 10 Things You Need to Know About Casino Betting in Nigeria Such discordant tunes, coming from the agriculture ministry, though unfortunate, are hardly surprising. It merely mirrors the dysfunctionality, the appalling lack of harmony and coordination for which the Nigerian bureaucracy has long earned notoriety. It is hard to imagine that we are here referring to a flagship programme of the Federal Government which the president personally launched and on the basis of which the minister actually outlined the earlier referenced proposal on sharing, with no follow-ups and actionable plans drawn up. What other administrative fiat is the ministry waiting for that the minister could not obtain from the presidency in a matter of days, given that agricultural operations are time-bound? And, could the minister have gone ahead to publicise his proposal on the sharing of the equipment without the ministry first ‘owning’ them – so to speak? Isn’t that an implicit way of saying that the ministry officials couldn’t be bothered since it was the presidency that ordered them? Surely, the officials of the agriculture ministry have serious questions to answer. We daresay that such derelictions – in which government projects are treated as nobody’s business – have persisted because no one has been held to account. In the meantime, the least that the ministry can do is ensure that the distribution commences without further delay.
