Sunday Aborisade in Abuja
The Minister of Agriculture and Food Security, Abubakar Kyari, said yesterday that the database of farmers benefiting from agricultural intervention programmes of the federal government was corrupt and politicised.
He said many beneficiaries of the funds did not have a square metre of agricultural land anywhere in Nigeria.
He also lamented that the naira redesign policy carried out by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) from December 15, 2022 to early February this year when Supreme Court ruled against it , ran farmers bankrupt .
The federal government had on Jul 31, 2023, approved N200 billion as intervention for provision of stable food and agricultural inputs.
The minister stated spoke when he appeared before a joint National Assembly Committee on Agriculture to defend his ministry’s budget for the 2024 fiscal year.
Kyari told the lawmakers that the existing farmers’ database consisted names of politicians who are not even farmers.
He argued that the Nigerian agricultural sector will continue to face challenges unless the farmers’ database was reviewed and equipped with the right people to benefit the intervention programmes.
He said: “Our main problem today is the clean data of farmers. Unless our team will have that, we can never get it right.
“Today, even in some of the programmes that we have. I found one of our political bosses who has never been a farmer, he has never owned a farm in his life.
“He received a text message that he should go and redeem his fertiliser from an agro dealer and he called me and said did you put my name in the palliative?
“It is not even palliative. I said , I don’t even know your full name. I only know you as Bagura, I didn’t know that you are Bagura so so and so.
“So, he sent me a copy of the text message. That is to tell you how corrupt that database is.”
The minister, however, assured the National Assembly that the federal government would collaborate with the national and state assemblies to review the farmers’ database.
He said: “I would like to say here that we need to work together with the state and also with members of the National Assembly and the State Assemblies to make sure and come up with a clean data of farmers.
“Let us move away from doing that for properties, let us do it for our plants so that we can have a map. It will take a while but let us start from somewhere.
“Without doing that, we will never get our input, the right person and at the right time and this is what we have been trying to do.”
The federal government created a database for farmers in June 2021 to monitor and evaluate performances of farmers who are beneficiaries of the Agricultural sector for Food and Jobs Program (AFJP).
The minister also lamented the high rate of food insecurity in the country and noted that Soya beans was being exported to foreign countries in large quantities.
He said: “Soya beans, for instance, is being wiped out from our system. Today, Soya bean is worth N430,000 as at last week, that is what we use for our poultry feed.
“It is being exported in large quantities. We are trying to see how we can involve security agencies.
“Trying to safeguard our food security is very important and it’s very key. We have already notified our security agencies”.
Chairman of the joint National Assembly Committee on Agriculture, Saliu Mustapha, commended President Bola Tinubu for identifying agricultural development as one of the parameters of the 2024 budget.
Mustapha said the joint committee will treat the budget of the agricultural sector with utmost commitment.
