First, in order for manufacturers like Innonson cars to flourish, you need to have a strong upstream sector, particularly in power and steel. These two sectors are the bane of Nigeria’s industrial development, and ones that require decisive and strong interventions from the federal government. Ajaokuta, for example, is well behind time in terms of technology. The same can be said about the obsolete approach to power, both in terms of production and distribution.

Ordinarily the current state of the Nigerian economy, with such drastic devaluation of the currency and the attendant high exchange rate, should be a manufacturer’s auspicious opportunity. Why? Because they can take advantage of favourable labour conditions to produce at a significantly cheaper rate compared with their international competitors. However, in the Nigerian case, this potential advantage is entirely wiped off by the almost total absence of a functional upstream sector in steel production, and manufacturers have to rely on foreign firms for raw materials, and having to generate their own power at an exceptionally high cost.

Of course, their international market positioning is weak to start with, given the superior technological and resource advantage of their competitors. Even so, government could have taken measures to at least stimulate the domestic market through public procurement. That is not protectionism, and developed countries routinely follow this strategy. Not so for Nigeria’s hopelessly selfish and clueless rulers. They’d rather import BMW for all ministries and parastatals.

The economic recession hasn’t helped matters, with less money in the hands of a previously flourishing middle class.

I hope Innonson Motors keep afloat, as an example and inspiration to others, but Nigeria has a long long way to go in order to achieve sustainable industrial progress.

Originally published on social media on 1st September 2016

Seun Kolade

September 2016

The web and media are abuzz with Ebola these days. A westerner gets infected and all media outlets provide wide coverage on all the details. But we all know the epicentre of it, Africa. According to the World Health Organization the death toll has surpassed the 4000 mark. But Ebola is nothing new is it? Just like Malaria, so far the biggest killer in Africa. Ebola gets a lot of attention largely because everyone (Africans and the world) is at risk (not necessarily the case with malaria). As it is typically the case, African Governments are desperately looking for the West to bring a cure. When news of Zmapp came, many Africans saw in this, once again, an innovative solution coming from somewhere else to solve an African problem.

Isn’t it time to stop though? Stop and think for a while about innovation from an African perspective. Why is it that after years of independence from colonial rule, we still have to look to them? Are Africans not going to the best universities in the world? Don’t they work for the best possible organizations and companies out there? And isn’t it time we started truly looking from within to solve our problems? I know these questions have been asked a lot already. Much has been said about the flight of talents from the continent. Many well-educated Sub-Saharan Africans feel they have better opportunities out of their respective homelands and it is easy to see why. It is often simplistic to assume they leave their countries just because they want to earn better wages. This is only one among many other reasons. Fostering a real culture of innovation for Africa comes down to a lot of factors, but these three are key to solving our problems: liberalizing free thinking, supporting our innovation environment and leveraging our talents.

Liberalizing free thinking

Free thinking was the basis of the enlightenment movement in the 18^th century. The enlightenment movement later brought about the industrial revolution whose ripple effects still affect our daily lives today. Authors like Emmanuel Kant with its famous quote “sapere aude”, dare to know in English were instrumental to the enlightenment movement. The African enlightenment movement is long overdue. Our fathers fought for our political independence, we need to fight for our economic independence. This starts with an audacity to think differently. Governments in Africa should encourage rather than deter it and civil societies should demand it. Real solutions to African problems will come when people are free to open up and think about the issues that affect us from a real critical perspective. We should not let the economist or the financial times tell us about our immense growth prospects. So long as double digit growth figures do not provide jobs, shelter and food, Africa is not thinking and Africa is not rising. Besides it is not like we are not thinking already, we are but we need to think more especially about our innovation environment.

Supporting our Innovation Environment

When Arthur Zang realised 30% of Cameroon’s 22 million people suffer from high blood pressure, a key contributing factor to heart disease, he designed cardio pad. This a touchscreen device that serves as a complete diagnostic kit for people in remote area. His effort has drawn a lot of attention. From being featured on forbes, to winning a rolex award and recently speaking at Ted, Arthur Zang has been making a big name for himself. True he has been receiving a lot of attention from local news outlets in Africa but very little support, save from the FCFA 20 million ($385050) awarded to him by President Paul Biya of Cameroon. This is a student from poorly equipped university of Cameroon. Shouldn’t people and governments take notice to provide more enabling environments from our scientists? Like previously stated above, our talents are not leaving for wages related issues only, many of them don’t find in Africa the kind of environment that enables them to excel at what they do. Africans typically make a name for themselves abroad before coming back. Should it not be the opposite? How do we leverage our talents?

Leveraging our talents

This is not just bringing our best brains back. It is actually formulating a strategy on how to best use the resources we have out of the continent. It is providing better incentives (not just financial) in order to attract our best talents. It is more importantly, outlining a vision that is inspiring enough to get talents to believe in Africa. It is frustrating when foreign news outlets tell us how rich we are and how great we could be as if we did not know that ourselves.  We don’t care whether the French, British or Americans believe in our potentials. We do care however about the kind of vision and strategy our governments are articulating so millions can be lifted out of poverty. This is in part down to getting the most talented Africans together so they can solve our problems. From Ebola, Malaria, education, access to basic healthcare, infrastructure and energy, access to food and water there is no shortage of challenges to tackle and it is about time we get to critically think about innovation from an African perspective, provide a more enabling environment for our talents and leveraging them to grow in a manner that benefits all. This is not only possible but very realistic.

Nigeria, with an estimated population of 175 million people, is the most populous country in Africa, and about 50% of the population live in the rural areas. The total land area is 911,000sq.km, and about 80% of this is available for various agricultural purposes, including arable land, permanent crops, pastures, and irrigated land.

Food poverty and rural poverty

Although Nigeria is the world’s largest producer of cassava, yam and cowpea, it is still a food deficit nation and a net importer, and more than 80% of rural dwellers in particular live below the poverty line. Agricultural land is severely underutilized, with less than 50% of land cultivated as of 2009, and a very small fraction of irrigable land has been irrigated (IFAD, 2009a).

The contribution of agriculture to GDP has been put at 23%, and about 90% of food and agricultural output is from small-scale farmers who cultivate between 0.5Ha in the densely populated region to about 4 Ha in sparsely populated areas (FAO, 2013).  Among other things, neglect of rural infrastructure, land degradation and drought, and non-availability and /or non-access to equipment and innovations have resulted in low yield and non-profitability of agricultural production.

Recent surveys indicate that about 44% of male farmers and 72% of female farmers cultivate less than 1 hectare per household, despite the fact that about 34million ha out of 83million ha – 40.96%- of agricultural land is currently being cultivated. Reports indicate that about 90% of Nigeria’s food is produced by small-scale farmers cultivating small pieces of land (IFAD, 2009a; IFAD, 2009b). Moreover, for the less than 50% of agricultural land currently being cultivated, yield per hectare is low compared to other developing countries like Brazil and Thailand

Innovations and institutions

Many researchers and development agencies have suggested that, considering the fact that majority of poor people in developing countries are small-scale rural farmers, intervention efforts should be primarily targeted at them, in order to effectively mitigate poverty and promote inclusive development. Recently, there have been debates about whether focus on small-holder farmers, to the exclusion of private investments in big firms, is the way forward for economic transformation of sub-Saharan Africa. Questions have been raised about economies of scales and the need to improve labour productivity in the agricultural sector. Related to the question of productivity is the challenge of access to, and optimal use of technological innovations.

It is widely recognised in the diffusion literature that poor, small-scale farmers are at distinct disadvantage regarding access to, and use intensity of, technological innovations, compared with large scale farmers and big corporations. Among other things, smallholders struggle with limited access to information, lack of access to credit, and limited technical knowledge. My investigation also affirms that, in fact, access to innovations is not enough for overall improvement of farmers’ productivity and profit. Institutional factors, including markets and government policies, play significant role, and there has not been sufficient attention on the impact of these on small-holder agriculture.  Like several others in our sample, one farmer laments:

The challenges I face is that there is no help, government should be assisting us in giving out money to us to use in farming and then we can return the money that was given to us. There are no amenities, we do not have electricity, and as you can see there is no good road nor is there borehole (for potable water). Transportation is another main challenge, after harvesting our farm produce, we do not have readily available transport for us to transport our farm produce to the market…

Clearly then, for many farmers, the challenge they face go beyond the question of accessing innovations, but also the question of the institutional environment, including markets and infrastructure, that can hinder or foster the success of adopted innovations. For example, another farmer affirmed that, even in the event that farmers achieve high productivity, they may ultimately lose out due to poor access to market and volatility, and lack of storage, processing and other value added facilities:

Marketing tops the list of our challenges.  Personal consumption of our produce is, in fact, the only profit we have. Farmers can boast of profit only once every 4 years.  At the beginning of this year a truckload of maize sold for N100, 000 while a tractor-full went for N70, 000 but currently, that same quantity goes for just N20, 000!…

Cooperatives to the rescue?

In my research, I examined the question of whether and how cooperatives can help small-holder farmers to overcome barriers to successful uptake of technological innovations in Nigeria. I also consider how cooperatives can help mitigate the challenges and difficulties of the institutional environments.

Cooperatives are not, of course, new to Nigeria. They have been in existence since colonial times, and continue to operate in various forms in the present time. The main problem is that farmers’ cooperatives have not, on the whole, evolved and moved with the time. Today, many farmer groups and cooperatives exist mainly as conduits for receipt of intermittent government loans and subsidies. By and large, government intervention efforts, in addition to been erratic and limited, have been poorly conceived as welfare programmes. This was much recognised recently by the current (2014) federal minister for agriculture, who stated, among other things, that there is a need for a paradigm shift from treating agriculture as a ‘development programme’, to a virile business model. Part of this shift in thinking is to reduce farmers’ mindset of heavy dependence on government, and develop entrepreneurial capabilities of farmers.

This is easier said than done, especially with regard to the current state of smallholder agriculture in Nigeria. I find that farmers’ cooperatives represent an auspicious platform for effective integration of small holder farmers into successful agri-business. Farmers’ cooperatives, compared with individual small holders, are better positioned to overcome various barriers to successful innovation and increased productivity and profit. With regard to access to credit, for example, it was observed, from the views of commercial and public-funded banks, that formal cooperatives have better chances of obtaining loans as they can provide collective collateral on behalf of members, authenticate members’ farming activities, and have better structure in place to enforce loan repayments.

Similarly, formal cooperatives are better positioned to overcome, or at least mitigate, the economies of scale and high transaction costs associated with procurement of innovative inputs and viability of processing machinery and enterprise. With respect to market competitiveness, cooperatives are able to gain better access to new markets by bridging social capital with apex organisations, and linking social capital with domestic and foreign food companies and supermarket chains. On the issue of land tenure, farmer groups are more able to access land on collective leases from government or community owners, and they are also able to exercise more effective influence on government policies relating to resolution of resource conflict and farm land security. Moreover, the effectiveness of government contribution and support, say with regard to provision of essential infrastructure, depends to some extent on the strength and viability of organised farmer groups.

In order to achieve this, however, cooperatives cannot be effective in their current form. They have to reform and adapt to the dynamic challenges and opportunities of the twenty-first century.

References

FAO, 2013. Nigeria- land use and crop production data, Rome, Italy: United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation.

IFAD, 2009a. Agriculture in the federal republic of Nigeria, Rome, Italy: International Fund for Agricultural Development.

IFAD, 2009b. Federal republic of Nigeria: country programme evaluation, Rome, Italy: International Fund for Agricultural Development.