There is one Nigerian I want to take with me in a leap back in time. He is Abdullahi Adamu. He was governor of Nasarawa State for two terms consecutively, from 1999 to 2007. Thereafter, he was elected to the Senate in February 2011 and reelected severally afterwards. In March 2022, he became chairman of his new love, the APC party and he held that post until July 2023 when he gave it up. At what point in time I want to take this uncanny politician to is located some time in September 2009. September 28, exactly – some 15 years today.
That day, Adamu came calling on senior editors at Peoples Media Limited, publishers of Peoples Daily and Peoples Daily on Weekend. He was accompanied by the late Rufa’i Ibrahim, the PML managing director. Adamu had finished his tenure as state governor only two years earlier and taken up farming full time. His visit to Peoples Daily was in his capacity as Chairman of the Foundation for National Agricultural Show of Nigeria [NASN]. He had come to promote the third show in the series billed for October 12-16 2009. The first took place in 2007, Adamu’s last year in office as governor. The third he was overseeing had been planned to coincide with the World Food Day celebration that year. The venue of the “show” was the sprawling International Market that Adamu built while he was in office.
Why agricultural Shows now? After all, they were not a new idea that you would say its time had come. No, Adamu agreed. Regional governments, after independence, organized them to show areas in which the three regions had comparative advantages. The military that replaced the elected civilian administrations, after the 1966 coup d’etat, continued with them. For example, the government of Kaduna State staged a farm produce show in 1983 for visiting head of state, Major General Muhammadu Buhari, at Zonkwa. I, a young reporter then, covered the event for the New Nigerian. It drew a big crowd majorly because there was “a new sheriff in town”. That apart, southern Kaduna demonstrated great potential to be the North’s, if not the nation’s, “food basket”. That was the only occasion that I visited Zonkwa. I never went back even though I lived and worked in Kaduna between 1981 and 2008. I married and had all my children there before finally moving out.
Later, the agric shows or exhibitions were converted to regional trade fairs by the military. But they retained the agric component. The two reputable ones were the Kaduna International Trade Fair that usually held between January and February every year and the Lagos Trade Fair. The two enjoyed a considerable degree of international patronage, which justified their being labelled “international.” That held out much promise of eventual agricultural mechanization and over all economic industrialization. Unfortunately, the dream remained just that, a dream.
Adamu wasn’t surprised.Too much of government involvement with the fairs was the first mistake. Their “poor conceptualization”, according to him, meant that even though they took off, they didn’t grow. Corruption was another factor, followed by insecurity as a result of rising religious intolerance and violence, especially in the North. Adamu said it was time the narrative changed for good. That was why National Agricultural Show of Nigeria was born “to make a difference.” It was conceived to “involve all stakeholders” in the agricultural value chain – farmers, equipment manufacturers, bureaucrats, agro allied industrialists, marketers, and end users. It was no oversight that he never mentioned the government. Because it was no good business manager and agriculture should be a business. That was why a foundation was raised to manage the NASN. He chaired the foundation.
The first thing it did was oppose President Umaru Yar’adua’s plan to privatize agriculture. Adamu said “the low capacity of our farmers” would make them losers, not beneficiaries. “There’s still a lot of ground to cover before any talk of privatization,” he said. Yet it was privileged politicians and former senior government officials that eventually used their money to buy farmers out of their small landholdings and turn them to labourers on their former lands. They then turned their new acquisitions into enclosures similar to what happened in pre-Industrial Europe in the 17th century. They posed as defenders of poor small time farmers only to deal them a bad hand! Be careful next time who you choose as a business friend. Not all that call you Lord! Lord! know you, including the Adamus.
