From Sola Ojo, Kaduna
Northern Nigerian voices on Thursday demanded that the new President Bola Tinubu prioritise the issue of security by way of reviving the agricultural sector in the region to provide mass employment for young persons many of whom are being used for criminal activities.
The vast majority of Nigerians of northern extraction believed that once the issue of mass unemployment, which could only be largely solved through agriculture is addressed, the region will once again know peace as it used to be.
Speaking with newsmen in Kaduna, the Director of Arewa (North) House, Kaduna, Dr Shuaibu Shehu Aliyu, said the region has a strong conviction that if Tinubu can employ and apply his capacity and ability as he did to transform Lagos, the North and the rest of the country will prosper under his administration.
To him, one important area we expect this government to focus on in the North is to revive agriculture. By this, we mean the government must focus its attention on agriculture because no other sector can employ the population of Northern Nigeria than agriculture.
“We must look at the agric value chain in terms of production, processing and marketing. We have land. We have the weather. We have the people. We have everything we need to become the agric hub of the Country.
“Government just needs to build processing factories so we don’t have to transport our farm produce from the North to the South for processing and marketing. We need technological-driven agric practices to enable us to produce more than what we can consume internally.
“From here to Dakar, there is no barrier and that is a huge market for us. So, improvement in agriculture and power are enough to address insecurity in the North because the issue of insecurity is largely aggravated by unemployment”, he said.
He continued, “Look at how the collapse of industries in Kaduna has aggravated insecurity in the State. Textile industries used to employ thousands of people directly apart from auxiliary services provided by food vendors, sales agents, cotton farmers and so on.
“Now, the government must look at the policies that led to the collapse of these industries. Policies that led to over-taxation. Let us see how we can revive cotton production in the country because we have the best cotton variety in the World”, he said.
One issue we are grabbling with now is the issue of population explosion. Nigeria is said to be the largest country in the World by 2050. We need to learn from Japan, India and China how they have been able to make their huge population productive. We need to think about how to feed this population and that can only be done through agriculture.
The custodian of Northern history and documentation also has a word for the new governors across the country.
“We also want to extend our congratulatory message to all new governors elected on their respective political party platforms. We pray and hope they will build on the good their predecessors left and also make amends where necessary.
“We don’t want to see a country build on parochialism, sentiment, or emotion, especially in the states where we have a new party taking over. The issue of non-continuity is critical in our nation-building.
“A situation whereby a new administration will abandon inherited projects that have gulped good resources will not help us. We pray God will help them to navigate difficult terrain both at the federal and state levels”, he said.
On subsidy removal he said, over time, both the government and economists have been saying the subsidy is not sustainable given the global oil regime and our forex capacity.
“However, we hope the price will come down sooner or later must as we saw in the telecoms sector where we were buying a mobile line as high as N35,000. But today, it has come down by a very wide margin. This is our expectation.
“Spending billions of naira on a product that is not 100 per cent going to the Nigerian populace is not sustainable. A lot of these marketers are siphoning this resource to neighbouring countries. Let’s endure the hardship for some time and see how we can support the government”.