The General Overseer, Holy Spirit Mission, Bishop Charles Ighele, has advised the government to realise that the country is an agrarian and not an oil-producing country and should therefore, give prominence to agriculture as it did before the discovery of oil.
He said this in Lagos at the media parley on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the church.
Ighele said the country started getting it wrong right from the time of oil discovery, when it removed its focus on agriculture that was the main wealth of the nation at that time, namely cocoa in the West, oil in the East, rubber from Mid-West, cotton and groundnut pyramid in the North.
“Nigeria as a nation and the continent of Africa as a whole had been positioned by God to feed the world where we have between 65 per cent to 68 per cent arable land which is enough a message.We have nine months of rainfall in a year in Nigeria, while we have three months rainfall in Gambia.Without any controversy, agriculture is the way out,” he said
He, however, lamented the situation where the rich are predominantly in charge of agriculture in Nigeria where other local farmers are pushed out either because lack of access to loans to develop their farms or the insurgence of Fulani herdsmen killing farmers on their farms.
He added that it is highly regrettable where farming is concentrated in the hands of the rich who can easily have access to loans and that a lot of efforts by the government to develop farming among the grassroot have always been frustrated with no success at the end of the day. He noted that the government need to take a drastic stand to entrench agriculture in Nigeria to save the country from all the avoidable mess of high cost of food and living Nigerians have found themselves.
He reminded the government of the essentiality of four factors of production to be imbibed for the country to move forward, namely land, labour, capital and entrepreneurship.
He remarked that land should be made available and accessible for Nigerians, education should be skewed towards agriculture, capital in the name of loans should be made available while entrepreneurship should be encouraged with a total shift from oil as the source of major revenue for the nation.
