By Favour Nnabugwu & Providence Obuh

Indications are that the federal government has been jolted by the economic reality staring the nation in the face and is posed to move the economy out of the woods. At the National Economic Council meeting last Thursday the Minister of Finance was said to have urged the gov-ernment to take urgent steps to diversify the economy in view of current harsh economic situation. The minister emphasised that Agriculture needed to be more seriously embarked upon by all levels of governments and citizens with renewed vigor.

According to her, the Federal Government was pursuing Self-Sufficiency in food production with all seriousness and will soon launch “The Green Alternative” as a road map following FEC’s endorse-ment.  The two main thrusts of the road map will be to operate in partnership with State Governments to meet national production targets and  production of export commodities as well as CBN Anchor Borrowers Progra-mme to support millions of small-holders in rice production.

Already the Bank of Industry in collaboration with the Central Bank of Nigeria has started a scheme geared toward self sufficiency in rice production in Nigeria. The pilot scheme which took off in Kebbi state has become a success story that President Muhammadu Buhari has approved the replication of Anchor Borrowers’ Programme (ABP) in 14 States.

Acting Managing Dire-ctor, Mr Waheed Olagunju, said that commodity-based industrialisation holds the key to Nigeria’s economic diversification drive. He said the country was naturally well endowed with several commodities that could boost Nigeria’s competitiveness as a country.

He said, “each state has at least one mineral or crop where it has comparative advantage, which should be explored” and this could help reduce the level of unemployment rate in the country. Olagunju identified self reliance as one of the variables for measuring the extent of a nation’s strength, lamenting that Nigeria can not claim to be strong when statistics have shown that it accounts for $11billion out of $34 billion Africa spends importing foods. “We have all it takes to feed ourselves. We need to domesticate our production capacity because we have the market, the population and natural resources.

“Given our resources endowment as a country, we have under performed, we have not done well, when you compare Nigeria in 1970 with China, our indices were better than those of China. In 1970, the GDP per capita for Nigeria was $235 and that of China was $111, Nigeria was ranked 88th in the world and China was ranked 114th in the world. What happened in 44 years: China is now 2nd in the world, Nigeria 26th in the world, what did we do with our lives in 44 years and what have we continued to do with our lives. We are all talking about transforming industrial sector, we all need to transform.