Business
Nigeria eyes private funds to spark agriculture boom
Halliru Saleh, a franchise leader, told AFP in a phone interview that with Doreo’s partnership he has boosted his per-harvest output to 400 bags of maize from 35. His workforce, meanwhile, has shot up from five to 100. Perhaps most crucial is a guaranteed nine percent return that Doreo has promised his “high net worth” investors because, like the agriculture minister, Masha believes the best way to ignite a revolution in the sector is to offer wealthy people a chance to get wealthier.
“If I said to investors, ‘Hey guys, it’s the right thing to do, please help my farmers’… I create 100 jobs,” he said. Creating millions of jobs requires “a value proposition that brings together the right group of partners,” he added. Because decades of weak governance has left Nigerian agriculture in disarray, Masha argued that it was now time for the private sector to lead.
Adesina, named African of the Year by Forbes magazine in 2013, largely agreed. Policies he inherited that were nominally designed to help farmers had in fact become money laundering schemes, he said, specifically pointing to a subsidized fertilizer program which was “terribly corrupt” and “terribly inefficient”.
Among his top priorities as minister, he said, was “to cut out all the crap within the system” and forge policies that allowed private investors to get rich. A signature example is the government-backed creation of so-called processing hubs to address Nigeria’s massive infrastructure gaps, especially poor power supply.
At the hubs, the government aims to provide full-time electricity so firms can set up processing plants without the burden of running a generator, a prohibitive cost that keeps many foreign companies away from Nigeria. At the conference, he boasted that Africa’s richest man, Nigerian industrialist Aliko Dangote, had invested $2.5 billion in agriculture and urged smart investors to follow his lead. “When you see cassava,” he said, referring to one of Nigeria’s staple crops, “just think money.”
Source: eNCA
