Nigeria: Agricultural Transformation - Is Jonathan Winning? (2)

2 December 2011
analysis

Let us, first get a glimpse of the rot in this critical sector of the Nigerian economy believed to have "unmatched credentials". Take infrastructural decay. Almost all the large earth dams built during the First Republic in the 1960s and sustained in the 1970s by General Yakubu Gowon and by General Obasanjo's military governments with the help of the World Bank and other development partners to boost agricultural productivity and generate electricity, especially in the North have broken down and are today breeding places for snakes that terrorize the host communities. Often, in the rainy season, a huge volume of water bursts through the dams' spillways, flood entire villages, killing people and destroying crops.

The case of the nation's 12 river basin development authorities is even more sickening. They are the Anambra-Imo RBDA, Benin-Owena, Chad Basin, Cross River, Hadejia-Jamaare, Lower Benue, Lower Niger, Upper Benue and Upper Niger. The rest are Niger Delta, Ogun-osun, and Sokoto-Rima. Created to enable all year farming, livestock development and power generation, these RBDAs have instead become "sinking holes" through which hundreds of billions of naira have disappeared over time. For instance, N40 billion was appropriated for them in 2009, N37 billion of this for capital projects alone. Recently, appearing before the Senate Committee on Agriculture to defend his ministry's budget, the Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Dr. Akinwunmi Adesina, revealed that the performance of the RBDAs had been dismal so far -a result of mismanagement and corruption. But then he shocked the senators when he said the federal government planned more of them. What he got were stares of utter shock.

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