Some Lessons Are Worth Learning Anew

The year was 1979. In the city of Monrovia, Liberia, Africa’s Heads of State and Government, at the 16^th Ordinary Meeting of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) adopted the Monrovia Declaration.  It was a declaration of commitment by the Heads of State and Government of the OAU on the guidelines and measures to foster national and collective self-reliance in economic and social development. What was unique about this period? Many of the African countries gathered in Monrovia were celebrating nearly 20 years of independence.

What had happened in these nineteen years?  Between 1960 and 1975, the percentage change in Africa’s Gross National Product (GNP) per capita as a proportion of world GNP was -5. Between 1975 and 1990, this drop in regional GNP per capacity compared to the rest of the world had widened to -33. In the mean time, African countries had gone from exporting about 1.3 million tons of food a year to depending on food imports and hand-outs so as to feed their growing populations. What went wrong? For the most part, the primary responsibility for the African tragedy was laid at the feet of African governments and Africa’s elites. The Report produced by Elliot Berg for the World Bank in 1981 declared unequivocally that African governments undermined the process of development by destroying agricultural producers’ incentives to increase output and exports. Marketing Boards which worked under colonial rule were improper instruments for the new African governments and elites.

Worldwide, however, the 1970’s were marked by the Iranian revolution that caused a major spike in the price of oil. In the United States of America, inflation was raging and there was a new and serious crisis of confidence on the US dollar. Unfortunately, such external issues were not considered by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in assessing the crises in Africa. Substantial currency devaluations, dismantling of industrial protection, promotion of price incentives for agricultural production and exports, and substitution of private for public enterprise—not just in industry but also in the provision of social services --(what you might call unbridled globalization) —became the chief elements of the Structural Adjustment programs imposed on African governments by the International Finance Institutions.

But, in the 1970’s, there was a lone voice at the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) located at “Africa’s capital”, Addis Ababa. Prof. Adebayo Adedeji the then Executive Secretary of the UNECA led many African economists to point out that the instruments of “Structural Adjustment” would fail unless what was happening to Africa was looked at in terms of what was happening elsewhere in the rest of the world. When African Heads of State and Government met in Monrovia in 1979, they were willing to listen to the ideas promoted by Prof. Adedeji.

In 1980, the Monrovia Declaration was translated into the Lagos Plan of Action for the Economic Development of Africa (1980-2000) and was adopted by Africa’s Heads of State and Government at an Extraordinary Session of the OAU held in Lagos, Nigeria.

Permit me to quote from the preamble of the Plan: “The effects of unfulfilled promises of global development strategies has been more sharply felt in Africa more than in the other continents of the world. Indeed, rather than result in an improvement in the economic situation in the continent, successive strategies have made it stagnate and make it more susceptible than other regions to the economic and social crises suffered by the industrialized countries. Thus, Africa is unable to point to any significant growth rate or satisfactory index of general well-being in the past 20 years. Faced with this situation, and determined to take measures for the basic restructuring of the economic base of our continent, we resolve to adopt a far-reaching regional approach based primarily on collective self-reliance”----sound familiar to you? == (to me it sounds like this is the same principle that the African Renaissance was based,)

I leave it to historians to pass judgment on what African Heads of State and Government did to implement the Plan. An outcome of this Plan was the work by fifteen brilliant African scientists who developed the Prospectus that led to the establishment of the United Nations University-Institute for Natural Resources in Africa (UNU-INRA). The Institute will be celebrating its 25^th Anniversary later this year. I was fortunate and privileged to have served as its second Director. “

How Do We Deal With This Irony?

As I woke up this morning to listen to BBC's Network Africa news, I was informed of the visit by Liberia's Deputy Minister of Agriculture to Bangladesh. Liberia, is anxious to learn how to grow their staple food crop---rice. So many thoughts ran through my mind. Africa's premier research institution that works on rice was originally located in Liberia. Quite a bit of the work by what is known today as AfricaRice (originally known as The West African Rice Development Association or WARDA) on the famous NERICA rices was begun in Liberia. AfricaRice, one of the fifteen centers supported by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) has developed (and continues to develop) varieties of NERICA rice that are suited to Africa's growing conditions. It was not long ago in the 1980's when I was working for the International Fertilizer Development Center (IFDC) that this organization was supported by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to help the government and people of Bangladesh to develop suitable fertilizer technologies for irrigated rice. The work involved helping the government of Bangladesh to support the promotion of the use of fertilizers, especially, urea to improve the production of urea. Today, the lessons learned by the people of Bangladesh from IFDC have enabled the country to produce sufficient rice for its over 100 million people. As the Director of IFDC-Africa, I actually led a delegation of Nigerian policy makers to learn how fertilizer subsidies worked in Bangladesh! Please don't ask me if any lessons learned were ever applied!!
I was thrilled that Liberia is prepared to let the farmers of Bangladesh teach the Liberian farmers how to produce rice. Literally all the rice that is produced in Bangladesh is under irrigation. To my knowledge, Liberia does not have the irrigation infrastructure to promote rice production. In the meantime, AfricaRice has developed several "upland" rice varieties that, if adopted, can increase rice production several fold in Liberia. But, planting the right variety of rice is but one little piece of the puzzle. Bangladesh was able to succeed because of the adoption of appropriate fertilizer use technologies. As the government of Liberia invites the rice producers of Bangladesh to come to assist the Liberian smallholder farmer, I just wonder what other policy changes on infrastructure, on processing and on access to markets are being envisaged or better still being promoted.
In July 2006, Africa's Heads of States and Governments met at the Africa Fertilizer Summit in Abuja, Nigeria and declared "fertilizer" as "strategic product without boundaries". It was the recognition by these leaders that food security in Africa would not be a realizable dream unless better care is taken of the most important asset that African farmers have--their soils..
Perhaps, it might just be advisable if the Deputy Minister of Agriculture looked closer at home for the solution to Liberia's problems?

The Character of Jonathan

Last April, Nigerians came out in droves to vote for the man they felt would finally deliver to them the "democratic dividends" they had longed for. The list of luminaries of the PDP from each State for federal appointments has just been published. One would hope that President Jonathan had some ideas of who would work with him to deliver on the promises he made to the Nation and the world. We shall judge him by the calibre of people he chooses to work with him. The Party might have sent nominees. It is his responsibility to select those he fully trusts will enable him to fulfill his mandate to the Nigerian people. The names of the people who lost their lives so that Jonathan could govern Nigeria are not there, naturally. But, will Jonathan fail them? Will their sacrifices have been in vain? Will party loyalty subsume the desire of the average Nigerian for a decent life? These are the guidelines for Goodluck Jonathan. May the Good Lord guide him.

Promoting Food Security in Tropical Africa: An Understanding of the Soil Health of the Region

The majority of the 800 million people that inhabit sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) live in rural areas and depend on agriculture for employment and livelihood. But the past three decades have witnessed a stagnant or declining growth in agriculture. Thus, as at 2009, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) recorded that more than 265 million people in sub-Saharan Africa were hungry and malnourished and the region remains the only part of the world where the absolute number of the poor and people facing hunger and malnutrition is increasing. To begin to understand why the agriculture sector has underperformed, it is vital to understand the nature of the soil health of Tropical Africa.

Most of the soils of tropical Africa were formed from rocks of Pre-Cambrian origin. These rocks are made up of granites, quartz and quartzite-like materials. Soils formed from these materials are typically sandy. They are dominated by low activity clays that have very limited capacity to hold on to the exchangeable bases such as Calcium and Magnesium that are required as food by plants. We can therefore say that these soils have inherent low fertility. This situation has not been helped by the high temperatures and heavy rainfalls that are characteristic of the region. The high temperatures and heavy rainfall promote excessive weathering of the rocks and the leaching of the nutrients released during the weathering process to zones where they cannot be utilized by growing plants. Although the high temperatures and heavy rainfalls encourage the growth of vegetation, these same forces promote the rapid decay of dead organic materials. The result is that the soils have very low amounts of organic matter. Soil organic matter is crucial as it is the main source of nitrogen, a key nutrient for plants. Soil organic matter is also important for maintaining the buffering capacity of the soil. A soil with high buffering capacity reacts more slowly to changes brought about by management practices such as the addition of inorganic fertilizers.

Having been dealt a difficult hand by Mother Nature how was the tropical African farmer able to grow food for the family? The farmer was keenly aware of the fragile nature of the soils that she/he worked and adopted a system described as “shifting cultivation” for the management. This practice enabled the farmer to cultivate a piece of land for one or two years. The piece of land was then left to fallow for upwards of fifteen to twenty years to regenerate its fertility. This practice worked as long as the population was small. With increased and increasing population, farmers have been forced to stay on the same piece of land. This intensive cultivation has resulted in massive losses of plant nutrients, a process now described as “nutrient mining”.

It has been determined that by 2002, 132 million tons of nitrogen, 15 million tons of phosphorus and 90 million tons of potassium had been lost from 37 tropical African soils in 30 years.

The most efficient way to improve the soil fertility is through the use of fertilizers, primarily inorganic fertilizers. However, data from the International Fertilizer Industry Association (IFA) shows that tropical Africa is not a significant producer of inorganic fertilizers. Therefore, if agricultural production must be boosted through the use of inorganic fertilizers, such products must be imported. However, because many countries in tropical Africa have no access to ports and because of poor transportation infrastructure, fertilizer prices are very high. For example, 1 metric tonne of urea costing USD 90 in Europe would cost USD 400 in Mombasa or Beira on the East African coast, USD 500 in Western Kenya and USD 700 in Lilongwe (Malawi). At these prices, most smallholder farmers cannot afford to buy the fertilizers needed to improve the fertility of the soils.

At the beginning of the new Century, African Heads of States and Governments adopted the Comprehensive Africa Agricultural Development Programme (CADDP) as the framework for the development of the overall economy of Africa. The African leaders committed themselves to allocate a minimum of 10% of national budget to development in four priority areas known as Pillars. Pillar 2 expressly addressees the improvement of rural infrastructure and trade-related capacities for access to markets.

 

In 2006, the Heads of State and Governments met at Abuja at the Africa Fertilizer Summit and declared fertilizer as a “strategic commodity without borders”. Africa’s political leadership is thus well aware of the importance of providing adequate support to agriculture. Africa’s friends and development partners must hasten to the aid of the governments as they struggle to implement CAADP.

This Nonsense Must Stop

I am reproducing this piece from one who is more knowledgeable about the recently-held presidential elections in Nigeria.  I believe that what is contained in this piece by Simon Kolawole strengthens my argument that it would not be too late for General Buhari to stand up and be a Statesman.

Finally, I am beginning to question my convictions about the unity, peace and progress of Nigeria. After fifty years of independence and almost 100 years of amalgamation, Nigeria is still in shreds despite several efforts to stitch a country together. Hawkers of hate and vendors of violence always seem to have the upper hand. The sanctity of life is rubbish as far as they are concerned. When I saw the violence and killing spree that erupted up North after last Saturday’s presidential election, my ever-abiding faith in the unity of Nigeria was shaken to its very foundation. The only positive I could take out is that there were no reprisals in the South. This, as little as it may appear, has doused what might have become a widespread national calamity. I shiver at the thought of what might have been.

By the way, I am a believer in Maj. Gen. Muhammadu Buhari. I started dreaming of a Buhari presidency in 1998. I supported him wholeheartedly against ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo in 2003 and against Alhaji Umaru Musa Yar’Adua in 2007. But I saw certain things in the run-up to the 2011 presidential election that toned down my enthusiasm. First, I was very uncomfortable with the ethnic and religious undertone to the mobilisation for him. I kept getting reports of the messages being preached against President Goodluck Jonathan by Northern clerics on the ground that he is a “kafir”. I was further put off by the use of sheer intimidation and blackmail by Buhari’s supporters to force people to support their man.

Most importantly, I was highly discouraged by the failure of Buhari to factor the South into his political calculations. Since 2003, he had never won anything in the South.  If you’re going to be president of Nigeria, you have to reach out to all. Nobody is ever going to be president of Nigeria by appealing to only the people from his region and religion. In widely published news reports, Second Republic senator and deputy co-ordinator of Jonathan/Sambo Campaign Organisation in the North-central, Senator Walid Jibrin, pointedly accused Buhari’s party, the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), of whipping up religious sentiments against Jonathan in the North. It was an open secret. I was so worried because I knew where all these things would end up. Nevertheless, I believed it was overzealousness on the part of Buhari’s men, because the Buhari I know is not a bigot. Perhaps it was just politics.

Following the violence that erupted after Buhari’s defeat, it is amazing how some analysts have been so untouched by the killing of innocent Nigerians, including youth corps members, but have instead focused attention on politicking with figures. It is so amazing that some are trying to hide behind the “outrageous figures” Jonathan got from the South-south and the South-east to justify the killings in the North. These analysts tacitly support the mindless murders while pretending not to. They conveniently ignore the underage voting and the intimidation that jacked up the figures for Buhari in the far North. To them, there is nothing to be said about that. It is sauce for the gander and poison for the goose. Of course, under no condition should rigging be justified but fairness further demands that you don’t close your eyes to wrongdoing on any side anywhere in the country. How on earth can a sane person try to explain away the killing of innocent souls for any reason at all?

It is even more amazing that some people are saying the violence was not premeditated, that it was “spontaneous”. I beg to disagree. The violence started in Gombe on Saturday even before the results were announced. The Adamawa version erupted on Sunday night while we were still awaiting the results. Then it spread to other states. I don’t want to believe the rioters were so sophisticated that they had already compiled the results by themselves on Saturday or Sunday ahead of INEC’s announcement on Monday evening. They were being pushed to kill, to shed blood, to slaughter. By whom, I don’t know. But there was nothing spontaneous about that.

Come to think of it, the targets were clearly picked: anybody suspected to have supported Jonathan was put on the firing line. It was not just “kafirs” that were targeted. Even any Hausa/Fulani suspected to have supported Jonathan was dealt with for “selling out”. This explains why even the Sultan of Sokoto, Alhaji Sa’ad Abubakar III, was not spared the venom, allegedly for asking people not to vote along religious lines. A politician friend of mine from Malumfashi, Katsina State, said his house was burnt because he was a PDP member. “The houses of eight of us who are PDP members were selected and burnt, even though Buhari won our local government by a landslide,” he lamented to me on phone. A similar thing, called “Wetie”, happened in the old Western Region in 1964-65: anybody suspected of working for the ruling Northern Peoples Congress was tagged a quisling and marked for murder. What have we learnt since then? Are we not going backward?

Indeed, violence and intimidation had been systematically unleashed long before the general election began. Jonathan’s campaign office in Damaturu, Yobe State, was burnt down. When he went to campaign in Kaduna, his billboards were pulled down by youths shouting “Sai Buhari”. His campaign train was pelted with missiles in Lafia, Nasarawa State, and Gombe, Gombe State. Across the far North, people were routinely stopped and forced to chant “Sai Buhari”. You dare not say anything to the contrary! A former military governor told me he was returning from the mosque one day when Buhari’s supporters mobbed his car and asked him to tell them whom he was supporting. People were being forced to covert to “Buharism” through mob action. There is nothing spontaneous in this. Yet I insist that Buhari I know is not a violent politician. His campaign, to my mind, was hijacked by opportunists.

Why is Buhari so popular among the commoners up North? We need to understand the region’s socio-political structure a bit. There is a religious establishment, controlled by the clerics, and the political establishment in the hands of the political elite. Then there are the ordinary people on the street. The clerics wield the biggest influence on the crowd. The crowd goes wherever the clerics point to. The ordinary people detest the political elite because of perceived corruption and insensitivity to the plight of the masses. The political leaders are seen as oppressors. On the other hand, Buhari is seen as an honest person, “Mai Gaskiya”, the antithetical politician. He is, to the people, the liberator who would deal with the oppressors. It was very easy for the clerics to market Buhari; after all, he was running against a “kafir” and a “usurper” (Jonathan).

There was this interesting story of a cleric in Sokoto who bought buckets of black paint, gathered four of his children and marched them to the streets with the singular assignment of removing or defacing Jonathan's posters anywhere they were found. In a newspaper interview he granted after he was arrested, quizzed and released by security agents, the cleric said he did it because Jonathan violated the zoning principle of the PDP as it was the turn of the North to rule Nigeria. This is intriguing. Zoning used to be seen as a PDP thing. But as soon as Jonathan won PDP’s ticket in January, zoning became everybody’s problem. Many of my Northern friends who used to support Alhaji Atiku Abubakar and hated Buhari with passion quickly shifted their support to the retired general and started calling him an honest person. And even though it was not openly pronounced, Buhari had become the official Northern candidate. Many politicians, some of them criminals and PDP riggers, seized the opportunity and defected to the CPC, knowing fully well that Buhari’s popularity was going to be a stepping stone to winning elections.

But beyond the emotions of the mob out there, could Buhari have won the presidential election? From indications, he believed he would win enough votes in the North to force a run-off. He had no presence in the South at all. I have said it a million times that nobody can become president of Nigeria by winning votes in his region alone. His strategy, as I understand it, is that if he led with a simple majority of votes based on the North’s population, then there would be a run-off which he would also win relying on the North’s population. The miscalculation here, in my opinion, is that the North would vote as one. Someone even told me Buhari would win in the 19 Northern states. I did warn Northern politicians last year that the North could never vote as one. It has never happened before. The most popular political figure ever produced by the North, Alhaji Ahmadu Bello, never won in all the provinces in Northern Nigeria!

Some smart analysts have told us that the post-election killings in the North should be understood within the context of rigging in the South. If it had not been rigged, they said, Buhari’s strategy would have worked. One strand of this belief is that Buhari won the election and INEC deducted 40 per cent from his votes, thereby handing victory to Jonathan (Buhari called it “computer fraud” and said he had evidence). If this is true, Buhari would still not have won the election. He was credited with 12,214,853 votes to Jonathan’s 22,495,187. If Buhari’s votes were marked up by 40 per cent across the 36 states and Abuja, his total would be 20,358,088, still almost 2 million votes less that Jonathan’s. Yet, no fair-minded person would say Buhari scored 40 per cent of the votes anywhere in the South. It was an impossibility. I never saw how Tony Momoh and Yinka Odumakin were going to deliver those 40 per cent Southern votes to the CPC.

The other strand of this belief is that the figures from the South-south and South-east were “sexed up”. To be honest, the voter turnout in these two regions was staggering and suspicious. There is no doubt about that. There is no amount of explanation that will make me believe those funny figures from Abia, Imo, Rivers, Bayelsa and Anambra. But, let’s be reasonable here: even if we discount the “rigging” by as much as 70 per cent to keep voter turnout in the two regions at 30 per cent (compared to South-west’s 32 per cent turnout), Jonathan would still have polled 14,722,489. He would still have defeated Buhari by over 2 million votes. In fact, if the entire votes attributed to Jonathan from his region, South-south, were taken out, he would still have scored 16,376,579. He would still have won. So why the orchestration of violence and killings over a lost case?

And may I ask: how come the statistics experts conveniently ignore the massive underage voting incidence up North? One of the youth corps members who was murdered in cold blood in Bauchi had said on his facebook page that CPC supporters forced underage voters on him and demanded that the remaining ballot papers be handed over to them for thumb-printing. Is that acceptable? Fairness demands that we should condemn both the sexed-up figures from the South as well as underage voting in the North. It is illogical to say every vote for Buhari was legal and willingly given, while only Jonathan “sexed up” his own figures. The best way to sort out this sort of problem is by legal means, not arson and slaughter. Those who attempt to justify the killings on the basis of some warped statistics should have their heads examined.

I would sum up in this wise. One, the violence we witnessed last week was premeditated; the timing and the targets, in addition to the history of attacks that preceded the polls, put a lie to the suggestion that it was spontaneous. Two, the tension in the North over zoning—or the likelihood of a Northerner not occupying the No 1 position until 2019—contributed to the violence significantly; if Jonathan had not run, and say Atiku or IBB had defeated Buhari last Saturday, there would have been no killings. Three, even though Buhari is a good and credible candidate, his failure to command good following in the South, or work out an alliance with the ACN, was a political handicap for him; it was just practically impossible for him to win the presidential election with Northern votes alone, especially as the North was never going to vote in one direction.

Finally, while I agree that the figures from the South-south and South-east were too good to be true, even a generous discount would still not give victory to Buhari in those zones. Therefore, we should condemn the underage voting and forced support for Buhari in the North with the same passion with which we condemn the figures from the South-south and South-east. Justice must be done. Buhari and his supporters should gather their evidence and head for the tribunal. The fact that he lost at the courts in 2003 and 2007 does not mean there is no hope of a judicial victory, especially as Buhari says he has concrete evidence to prove that his votes were stolen or robbed off. Also, those who were responsible for the killings—and the reprisal killings—must be brought to book. The time has come for the government to show that it means business when it comes to protecting the lives of Nigerians. This nonsense must stop.

By Simon Kolawole.