Arising from the current harsh economic realities in the country, there is an urgent need to rework the nation’s recovery matrix, placing agriculture at the centre piece of all economic planning and policies.
In other words, Nigerians, as a people, need to look inward and be productive, utilizing effectively the abundant arable land resources at our disposal.
Pre-crude oil discovery era, agricultural produces were the economic mainstay of the various regions – cocoa and kolanut majorly in Western Region; Palm oil mainly in the Easter Region; Groundnut and cotton in the North, and rubber in the Mid-Western Region – and the lands were in economic prosperity.
Cocoa accounted for more than 70 percent of the internally generated revenue of the defunct Western Region, made up of present Ogun, Oyo, Osun, Ondo, Lagos and Ekiti states, aside other farm produces like kolanut, cashew, yam, plantain, cassava, among others. With IGR basically derived from agriculture, the Western Region government in pre-and post-it dependence era, under the visionary leadership of the late Sage, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, was able to run its four cardinal programmes of FREE Education, FREE Heath, Rural-Urban Infrastructures and Housing without recourse to borrowing from any financial institutions.
What this implies is that it is high time South West governors return to the basics by giving agriculture its pride of place in the scheme of things.
Without paying lip service to agriculture, but investing heavily therein, the good old days of the Western Region, with its various firsts – first television station in Africa; first tallest building in Africa; first university in Nigeria, among others – can be re-enacted.
As Nigeria, nay the globe, battles economic recession, leading insufficient food, we make bold to call on the governors of the six South-West states to return to the land, where the bulk of our wealth is domiciled.
We have no business being indebted to financial loan sharks if only we can return to the land and live in abundance thereafter.
The same call goes to governors of other geo-political zones in the country, as panacea to the economic quagmire bedeviling our nation at this critical time.
A stitch in time, as they say, saves nine!
