For a country that has been grappling with multidimensional challenges of underdevelopment for decades, the increasing need for proactive and futuristic policy measures to address the lingering crises can hardly be over-emphasized, especially when its population is surging and the poverty level is worsening by the day.
Today, Nigeria has slipped into socio-economic abyss with the attendant negative implications for the citizenry, especially the poor, who are bracing sundry odds in their efforts to eke out a living. Spiking inflation, pervasive insecurity, energy crisis, growing starvation, rising unemployment, malnutrition and other negative indices have characterized Nigeria’s ratings in global socio-economic and political performance indices on a yearly basis.
For instance, the latest UNICEF’s Nigeria Report indicated that the country had the second highest burden of stunted children in the world, with a national prevalence rate of 32 percent of children under five. The report projected that an estimated 2 million children in Nigeria suffer from severe acute malnutrition (SAM), but only two out of every 10 children affected is currently reached with treatment.
This is even as the World Bank Group, in its latest report titled ‘A Better Future for All Nigerians: 2022 Nigeria Poverty Assessment’ showed that the number of poor Nigerians was projected to hit 95.1 million in 2022.
With real per capita GDP growth being negative in all sectors in 2020, the Washington-based institution also predicted that poverty is projected to have deepened for the current poor, while those households that were just above the poverty line prior to the COVID-19 crisis would likely fall into poverty.
It stated: “Were the crisis not to have hit (the counterfactual scenario), the poverty headcount rate would be forecast to remain virtually unchanged, with the number of poor people set to rise from 82.9 million in 2018/19 to 85.2 million in 2020 and 90.0 million in 2022, due largely to natural population growth.”
It is against the background of the worrisome projections by the global institutions, analysts and development experts continue to make concerning the future of Nigerians, especially the children, women and the very poor, that the sustained interventions by the Godwin Emefiele-led Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) in the agricultural sector, despite budgetary constraints, can be well appreciated.
Yes, the apex bank has for decades been supporting the economy, particularly the agricultural sector, through sundry funding and policy supports, the brutal fact is that none of the past initiatives positively impacted the economy as the recent ones being championed by the current governor of the CBN.
The real import of the apex bank’s intervention in the life-supporting sector of the economy could better be analysed when it is noted that even when Nigeria was a signatory to the African Union’s Maputo Declaration of July 2003, which contained several important decisions regarding agriculture, but prominent among them was the commitment by the Heads of State “to the allocation of at least 10 percent of national budgetary resources to agriculture and rural development policy implementation within five years”, the Nigerian government has never allocated up to 3% of its yearly budgets to the sector.
Available data on budgetary allocation to the sector which over 150 million poor Nigerians wholly depend on for survival tells a bitter story.
A cursory analysis of the yearly federal allocations to the sector showed that out of the N4.493 trillion total budget in 2015, the agricultural sector got N40.6 billion, representing 0.90% of the total budget. In 2016, the sector got a total allocation of N75.8 billion or 1.25% of the year’s N6.060 trillion budget. In 2017, out of the total budget of N7.441 trillion, the sector received N135.5 billion, representing 1.84% of the budget.
Also, in year 2018 when the federal budget rose to N9.120 trillion, the agricultural sector got N203.0 billion or 2.22% of the year’s budget. In 2019, out of the federal budget of N8.916 trillion, the sector was allocated N164.8 billion, representing a mere 1.82% of the budget while in fiscal year 2020, out of the N10.594 trillion, the sector got N183.1 billion or 1.72% of the year’s budget.
But for the monetary policy sagacity of Godwin Emefiele and his team in the apex bank in the implementation of various intervention initiatives in the agriculture sector, especially the Agricultural Credit Support Scheme (ACSS), Anchor Borrowers Programme (ABP) and the Commercial Agriculture Credit Scheme (CACS), millions of poor and socially deprived Nigerians would have become food scavengers in a land naturally endowed to feed the global community.
According to data by the apex bank, the Agricultural Credit Guarantee Scheme Fund (ACGSF) since inception until March 2021, has facilitated 1.180 million loans valued at N122.632 billion to farmers nationwide.
This is even as it reported that the participating banks under the CACS had disbursed N672.9 billion loans to fund 636 commercial farming projects while total loan repayment stood at N443.9 billion. In terms of employment, the CBN disclosed that the companies that benefited from the CACS reported job increases of 24,457 between 2009 and 2018.
Similarly, data provided by the CBN showed that as at January this year, N927.94 billion had been disbursed to over 4.5 million smallholder farmers under the Anchor Borrowers’ Programme (ABP).
Speaking on why the apex bank initiated the ABP, the CBN Governor said the introduction of the programme was due to the huge foreign exchange (forex) being spent yearly by Nigeria on imported food items that could be produced locally and the negative implications for the country’s foreign reserves and job creation drives.
According to him, the allocation of forex to the importation of items such as rice, wheat, milk, fish, and other items, had contributed to the sustained depletion of the nation’s foreign reserves, especially in the face of low oil revenue earnings resulting from falling oil prices in the international market.
Emefiele further pointed out that the rising unemployment and escalating food imports prompted the apex bank’s management under his leadership to shift from concentrating only on price, monetary, and financial system stability to act as a financial catalyst in critical sectors of the economy, particularly agriculture, as a strategic step towards creating more jobs, improve local food production, and conserve scarce foreign reserves.
The CBN governor clarified that the ABP was designed to create economic linkages between over 600,000 smallholder farmers and large-scale processors with a view to increasing agricultural productivity and significantly improving capacity utilization of integrated mills.
Speaking at a forum a few weeks ago, Emefiele disclosed that under the ABP, a total of 2,923,937 farmers cultivating 3,647,643 hectares across 21 commodities through 23 participating financial institutions had been financed in the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) so far.
Interestingly, the impacts of the apex bank leadership’s commitment to the sundry intervention programmes are evidently proved in terms of their positive micro and macroeconomic results in the political economy.
According to statistical data by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), the coordinating agency for Nigeria’s official statistics, agricultural sector’s contributions to the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) rose to 22.35 percent in Q1 ’21, from 19.79 percent in 2020.
Notably, the sector also recorded 2.2 percent real growth in 2020, despite the contraction of the economy by 1.92 percent. It is even more exciting to note that largely due to the CBN’s interventions, the sector’s 3.4 percent real growth recorded in Q4’ 2020, represented its highest growth since 2017.
A further analysis of the CBN’s interventions in the sector showed that millions of Nigerian youths had been engaging in agribusinesses that span the food commodity value chains, thereby reducing the nation’s unemployment rate and insecurity threats. Some of these youths are already attesting to the transformational and economic values they are getting from engaging in modern agricultural investments.
Curiously, this impressive scorecard in the sector was achieved despite the interruptions to farming activities and food transportation, caused by floods and lockdown measures experienced during the year under review.
Beyond the quantitative computations on the interventions’ impacts are also the immeasurable benefits to millions of farming families and communities, who had hitherto lost interest in farming due to obsoleteness of their tools and low productivity but today have returned to their farmlands with high-yielding crop varieties and modern tools and now eating healthily and earning improved incomes.
Attesting to the positive impact of the apex bank’s contributions to the sector, analysts at FBNQuest, stated: “Our expectation was a slowdown in contraction to -1.95% and was undone by robust growth of 3.42% for agriculture, the sector’s best showing since Q4 ’17.
“Several times we have made the point that Nigeria’s performance would be more muted than that of most emerging markets due to the protection its large informal economy enjoys from global headwinds (such as COVID-19). The argument still holds but it could now be that the credit interventions of the CBN, state development banks and others are starting to have an impact”, FBNQuest added.
Also, several farmer groups have continued to laud the Godwin Emefiele-led CBN management for enabling the modernization of farming practices through funding, subsidized inputs and capacity building initiatives that have improved the quality of their outputs and turned many of their members to small-scale food commodity processors and in some cases, exporters.
For instance, the Rice Farmers Association of Nigeria’s (RIFAN’s) leadership has been praising Governor Emefiele and his team for supporting rice farmers in the country over the past four years with the result that Nigeria is gradually moving to the level of self-sufficiency in rice production.
The RIFAN President, Alhaji Aminu Goronyo, who spoke during the flag off the sale of nine million metric tonnes of paddy to millers and distribution of farm implements, fertilisers and other inputs to rice farmers for the 2021 wet season farming on June 24, 2021 in Kaduna said with nine million metric tonnes of annual rice production, Nigeria would be self-sufficient in rice and almost ready for exportation.
This is even as the All Farmers Association of Nigeria (AFAN) has continued to laud the CBN’s governor over the sundry interventions in the agriculture sector in view of the improved food productivity being recorded during wet and rainy season farming in the country.
A former President of the association, Mallam Ibrahim Kabir, had last October attested to the fact that ‘‘the CBN intervention has surely helped the food system and without it, the situation would have been more uncomfortable.’’
It is logical to conclude this analysis that with the unassailable statistical data evidences and personal and collective testimonies of farmers, farmer groups and agribusiness investors about the impacts of the CBN’s interventions in the agriculture sector, Godwin Emefiele could be aptly described as the “champion of food security” in Nigeria and a role model in good leadership deserving emulation by youths that share the vision that come what may, the ‘Nigerian project’ must not fail.
As some development experts have noted, consolidating on the Emefiele-led CBN management’s monetary policy measures in the agricultural sector remains the only logical option open to Nigeria in her efforts to guarantee healthy nutrition and food security for the growing population and achieve sustainable growth in the years ahead.
