The Executive Secretary of the Tertiary Education Trust Fund, TETFund, Arc. Sonny Echono has expressed confidence that if Nigeria gets it right in agriculture, half of its problems will be solved as the sector remains the easiest means of creating jobs.
Echono, who emphasized the importance of agriculture in addressing unemployment in the country, enjoined vice chancellors of Nigeria universities to apply more energy towards actualisation of agriculture transformation.
The TETFund boss spoke in Abuja at the vice chancellors’ roundtable on the implementation of Agricultural Research and Innovation Fellowship for Africa, ARIFA, in Nigeria with the theme: ‘building the post-vicosa symposium action plan.”
While urging the VCs to operationalise the TETFund Centres of Excellence, TCoE, as soon as possible, he stated that as the sector develops, the demand for personnel will increase and the universities will be in position to also improve their revenue.
He said there are countries that depends solely on agriculture and they are doing very well and agriculture is the one resource that God has blessed Nigeria with, adding that Nigeria can learn a lot from Brazil through partnership given their track record in the area of agriculture.
Echhono also noted that everything is build through national food security and it is responsibility of all Nigerians to ensure that happens.
“My charge to you is to make this a personal mission because I’m very confident that if will get it right in agriculture in this country half of our problems will be solved because it is the easiest means of creating jobs.
“Most of those who are being recruited into banditry, who are being recruited into the insurgency, if they are able to work on the land, they will perhaps prefer to do that.
“And if we can find modern ways of doing things that will significantly improve revenue because as the yield increase, of course revenues increases and it makes it more attractive.
“As we adopt new technology, develop our mechanization and irrigation we will find opportunities through commercial agriculture and we will be able to absorb the graduates that will produce because most of the issue if you notice, more than 60 percent of those who graduate with agriculture go on to do other things with their lives because we don’t have commercial farming that can absorb this workforce we produced.
“I enjoin you to take this message and take this issue very seriously. There may be few mistakes along the line but we should correct ourselves. We should operationalize the centres of excellence as quickly as we can,” he said.
Also speaking, the Executive Secretary of Agricultural Research in Africa, FARA, Dr Yemi Akinbamijo, said the workshop was to have an internationalisation process, saying that the outcomes from the meeting will feed into Post-Viçosa Symposium Action Plan, holding at University of Lagos from 14th – 16th July.
Akinbamijo said the meeting will focus on priority areas of demand for increased capacity in STEM, establishment of innovation platforms, among others.