 Welcome back. It is still the run-up and we're being joined by Dr. Chiwi Kewba. He's an economist, a public affairs analyst and the convener of Amaka Chiwi Kewba Foundation. You're welcome to the program. Thank you. So we're looking at agriculture and the non-oil export sector of the economy and how it can be boosted to help reduce the dependence on oil. That is what we're looking at today. Can you give us a background to what non-oil exports are actually? As the name sounds, as the name implies, it refers to exports of the nation that is not oil-related. So in this instance, you know how Nigeria, naturally, is the food exporter of crude oil. The crude oil is not in raw form. Those other exports that are not oil-related like raw materials, agricultural raw materials, semi-processed goods, co-aluminium and all that more of primary goods that are not oil-related. Non-oil exports. Sometimes it could also be expertise in terms of human capital. But unfortunately, for now, our IT sector is not yet developed that you can export like India and other exports. So non-oil exports refers to exports from a country that is not oil related. That's what it means. It's good that you clarified the thing to be crude oil and all that, because I was wondering, when you talk oil, and maybe someone out there will also be wondering, at some point in Nigeria, we were exporting palm oil as well until Malaysia came here, understudied us, and then took over the industry from us. So oil could also have been palm oil. But now we know the kind of oil that we were talking about. How do we develop this? We know that we have a lot of things apart from crude oil. We know we have the gold. We know we have the agriculture. We have, yeah, inside agriculture there's so much. We had cocoa wands that was ranked number one and the rest of those things. What is lacking? What do we need to do? How do we develop this sector, this non-oil sector, to be a very good foreign earner for our country? Let's say so. Well, I think first and first, it is important also that in the last two years, there has been an improvement in the non-oil sector exports. I think it was early last month, last October, that the chief executive of the Nigerian Export Propulsion Council informed us that in the last six months we have exported about $2.60 billion of non-oil exports to other countries. You know, we have compared that to previous years. We have seen that there is an improvement. But beyond that, outside that, there is still untapped potential that we have. And why we are still lagging behind is that we are still exporting all of primary goods that is raw materials. And what I have told you about the years that have you mentioned that in the past that we are a huge exporter of palm oil which led to other countries coming here to take a seat, modernize it, and now they are earning so much from that. Even granades, when we have the granades, the granades from the north, the cocoa and all that. People are still making a whole lot of money, earnings, forest earnings from granades from cocoa and all that. But in our own case, we stopped developing those sectors because of palm oil which naturally was assumed to be a cheap money. So the problem we have is that of prioritization. Government will be using weak money or cheap money, hence the neglect of these other sectors that are the main state of our economy, which should have been the main state of our economy. Oil is very volatile as we have seen. We can see the complications in the prices of crude oil from time to time. And we can see also how theft and all that has also reduced our earnings from those sectors. But if we are able to develop a non-oil sector, one of the things that will help us do is also create enough employment as we had in the past when the pesticides industries in Katna and Kano were boosted. So what key problem is government being able to prioritize non-oil sector and make the kind of right investments that are required. And those kinds of investments are the investments that is just to make the business environment more favorable, access to finance more easy or easier. So that the private sector enterprises that will play in those kinds of sectors will be able to make investments and be sure that they will contribute to those sectors. Secondly also, you can find out also what we are talking about. Currently it is more of raw materials and agricultural produce in terms of aspenia, semesties, cashew nuts and all that. If you spot cocoa in a raw form unprocessed, the money you get as far as earnings will be very, very minimal. But when you process it just into flow only, the earnings increases. And you see what happens when the western countries, Europe, Australia and other buyers are cocoa and they process it into chocolates. We spend billions of dollars to opt those things again to consume it. Because we do not have the business keys and technology to process them into those. So this ideal government is to look into, not just government in terms of that they will begin to do this, but creating the enabling environment that will also enhance investments in those kinds of areas. So there's been a lot of questions. I think even Bayou wants to ask a question. All right, Bayou, please go ahead. Okay, thank you. And Dr. Oba is always nice to get your perspectives. I was just wondering, as we head to 2023, I'm sure you've looked at the manifestos of some of the political parties, even though I haven't seen that for all of them. We have 13 or 14 presidential candidates. But are you of the view that our presidential candidates are sufficiently aware of the urgent need to diversify the economy from what you've seen from the manifesto? Okay, I think just being breaking that conversation. All man to himself, God for all. But that question that Bayou asked was a very good one. I mean, part of what we're doing here is setting agendas. And if you had gone through those manifestos by at least the presidential candidates that are in our faces, those ones that we know really about, who has come out to say anything about anything else, about except oil, you know, agriculture. And these other sectors, who has given priority? Well, what is coming into my mind is terrible. I've heard one talk about Abadou for a very long time. That's con. Anyway, that's just by the way. But I think none of these presidential candidates have really, really talked about agriculture and how, how to harness what we have, how to exploit what we have, to make it a very viable sector. Yes, they've been mentioning it, all of them, because they know. Sometimes you say it's, you have made more farmers. You have made more people go back into agriculture. It's not enough because making more people go back into agriculture is not the same thing as boosting agriculture in its own self. The countries that have food sufficiency do not even have a population of 10% going into agriculture. So if we go back into agriculture and we have like 90% of the people doing agriculture, that means they lost their jobs. They lost their jobs. They lost their jobs and went back into the farm. That doesn't mean that it improves. But if we want to look at it in the manner that we're talking about this morning, you wouldn't really say that they lost their jobs. That it would mean they left whatever they were doing to create even more jobs. That should have been a very good thing, but I tell you, they lost their jobs. Bayo is back. Bayo, welcome back. Is Dr. Oba also back? Bayo, can you hear us? Okay, Bayo. Okay, you know what I meant by, you know, they would have created even more jobs is, if we're talking about agriculture, I mean in the manner that we're discussing this morning, it wouldn't be subsistence farming, like farming at your backyard. It's going to be farming in a big way. You know, with all the mechanical things that you need, the tractors, the big farming tools, and you know, all the greenhouse and all that. If you see what is happening in my imagination right now. Well, you've never been a farmer, obviously. I haven't, you think so? Okay, this is how I'm seeing it. I know what you're saying, but this is how I'm seeing it. If we're doing commercial agriculture, for instance, in an entire village, one person could even be the one to farm all the farmlands that everybody needs and employment will be there. But if you find that there are so many people and everybody in that village is doing farming, and farming in itself, there's a problem. Because there's a whole value chain in agriculture. The people who can export, actually, it's not the farmers that go to the farm. The people who can process it, the people who can do one or two things, there's a very long value chain. But you find all the people, in quote, getting their hands dirty. You know that, there's a problem. Because you can't have too many people on the farms, and then you say, that is why you're getting more food. It's not it. If you have the machines, there wouldn't even be space for a hundred people to go with their machines and do like a hundred hectares in the community. So where is the balance? Where is the level playing field? Baya, you're welcome back. Can you hear us? Yes, I can hear you. And actually, we don't compare like each other. Surprisingly, we couldn't hear the studio. But it's good to be back now, yes. Okay. So we're just, you know, bantering as it were, like, okay, agriculture, is it really the same thing when you say people have gone back to farming? Is it the same thing as boosting agriculture as a whole? So we were talking from two different sides of the coin. And he accused me of never having done farming. I think that, you know, for me to be honest, I'm not a farmer in India, but I have had the opportunity of traveling extensively across Nigeria. Maybe there are only two states that have come to Nigeria. And when I say that, I mean, both in the cities and in the rural parts of the state. And there is extensive agriculture from what I can see, especially in the north. In the middle belt and in the north, there is extensive agriculture. But what I find, for example, in the north, I actually saw a lot of mechanized farming and mass, you know, farmers, you know, when I say mass, I mean, they don't have mechanized farming, but a lot of them working on the fat. But it would look like, but you are, you have been a farmer, correct me if I'm wrong. It would look like part of the problems are storage. Yeah. Storage, processing, transportation. Yeah. Okay. And... Okay, it keeps breaking. You know, one other question I would like to ask is, at some point in our lives as Nigerians, agriculture was the in and out for us. I mean, we had the ground-up pyramids. We had everybody producing one particular thing that they were known for from each region. And these things were being exported and it was, we were happy. Yeah. You know? At least our fathers were happy. So my question would have been like, are we ever going to get to the point where we, where we have all these other things that we feel like we have now all being the center of conversation today and still be able to proudly say that our agricultural sector is back and even better than what it used to be. Like Dr. Ubar said, Dr. Ubar said it made a lot of good points there. But you see, at this time, like you said, if agriculture comes back, it's still here. It does not go anywhere anyway. But if it comes back, I know what you mean, and becomes better, that means we shouldn't see the granite pyramids anymore. Because granite pyramids for me is not development. It shows that there is no good storage like Dr. Ubar said, and then there is no processing plant. How can you have so much granite being kept in a pyramid when they could be in an industry, in a company that is processing it into granite oil, or any other thing, or even as common as kulekulek and all that. I think that's why we tagged this conversation, agricultural development, because we're trying to move it to the future. We're trying to get it to be better, because it's beyond just packing food for the future. There is so much attached to it right now. People make fossil fuels out of residues from agricultural processes. We've not even gotten to that end of the conversation. We don't even know how to fertilize us now. One of the fears that we have in Nigeria is that the Russia-Ukraine War will stop us from having fertilizer to plant crops when we could have had some things to recycle to make fertilizers. We also have Dr. Ubar on the line. Dr. Ubar, you're welcome back. Can you hear us? Yes, I can. Okay. We're having that conversation about agriculture and non-oil exports just before we had that interruption. But moving forward, we've had a couple of conversations in the studio already. And where we got to is how that... We still have a lot of things that are being exported today, most of them in raw form, like you said, the cocoa and all of them. But the question is, we used to have a very viable agricultural sector where we exported a lot of things of raw materials before we discovered oil. Do you think there's ever going to get to a time where we would say that our agricultural sector is back to what it used to be and even better than it used to be? And what will it take to get there? I think your statement, it was... I can speak to the question you just raised, but I didn't get all that... First, it's possible to get where we are for a given better. First, we need to also have an integrated plant name integrated agricultural system where we are in both states, the local governments and the national government as the federal government. Because what we have now is planning that is piloted. You know, where the federal government will state certain things without consultation and in agreement with the sub-national government of the land. And you see how that planning has hazarded the situation and other and waste stages that are called. So the first thing to do is to begin to have a plan, a creative plan on agriculture. We are all to go and shall work kind of agriculture. We need to move into mechanized and green agriculture. Green agriculture in the sense that we don't just bring tractors to be addressed. You have a place where you still intend the green nature of the place since having your trees are not there. But also providing food and a food for another kind of land. And as you did mention and I said it in my introductory remarks also need to develop the capacity and the value chain we are able to process here before we export. Because that is where the money lies. And also in our package most of the things we export also that have been exported. Let me give you an instance. Go to the typical markets in this country. See that we are still exposing needs. Vegetables are along the road with all the pollution that are not rest of people. And these are the same products that we want to export to other countries. How do you think they will not wear packaged processed products? So we have a lot of most harvest need losses which is overall almost 60% produced and over 60% of what you produce are lost and destroyed. They are not being stored, they are not being processed and are not rest of people. So we can get to that place. Created planning and prioritization of agriculture and the ability to process these goods into semi secondary speciality products. But manufacturing or even manufacturing sector to introduce those kinds of things that we need to introduce. Okay, Dr. We would have loved to really continue this conversation. Bio asks you a question that we don't have time now to answer but we hope that we are going to continue this conversation. I remember that he asked if you have had any insight to any manifesto of the presidential candidates and what you think is significantly addressing agriculture and how to develop it but that would be something for another day because we have run out of time. We would like to say thank you to you for coming on the program. Thank you. Sorry for the interruptions that we had in the course of the discussion. Okay. Dr. Oba he has a positive outlook. He's optimistic that it can happen. Very good. He's optimistic that it can happen and I think it can happen. Someone was I watched a video today in one of the African countries and said she felt ashamed that the money that they were earning as legislators was more than what some states were budgeting and all that and that they should try to start from themselves, cut their earnings and all that. I know people that just left the group chats. Yeah. Someone now asked a question that someone now said for Nigerian legislators to go and learn how to be patriotic. To borrow a leaf, he used the word to borrow a leaf and a response that came to that is that don't mind them. Nigerian legislators don't need a leaf. They own the tree. Just that they don't like the vegetables that come from the trees. They know what to do. We will keep having these conversations and of course we're going to continue with these agricultural developments but that would be sometime else but until then we're going on a quick break. When we return we're going to be having this conversation around presidential candidates avoiding presidential debates. Don't go anywhere. The run up will return. Stay with us.