Agriculture in Nigeria was traditionally considered an exclusive reserve of rural dwellers, who more often than not had little to no formal education. Therefore, when after 38 years of being an accountant and leading some of the most prestigious organisations in Nigeria, Emmanuel Ijewere decided to venture into agriculture, it came as a rude shock to many.
Ijewere serves as Managing Partner of Emmanuel Ijewere and Co., a firm of Chartered Accountants. He is also an Independent Director of NOVA Merchant Bank Ltd. He started his accounting career in 1965 with Coopers & Lybrand and set up his own firm of Chartered Accountants, Emmanuel Ijewere & Co in 1979.
He has served as President to a number of notable organizations such as, the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria (ICAN), Nigerian Red Cross Society, Institute of Directors (IoD), among others. He has had extensive business and corporate management responsibilities, stemming from his Chairmanship role in several companies, including Learn Africa Plc, Best Foods Global (Nigeria) Limited, Longman Nigeria Plc, Petra Micronance Bank, Salus Health Trust Management, CSN Investment Concepts Limited, Drum Resources Nigeria Limited, among others. He is a member of the National Economic Forum, the International Investment Council and the Technical Committee on the Privatization of Federal Government Companies and Parastatals. He is the Chairman of FARCOM. He serves as a Director of Gemini Pharmaceuticals Nigeria Limited. He served as a Non Executive Director of CWG Plc since April 17, 2014 until October 14, 2016. He is a fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria (ICAN).
Ibrahim Babangida, as military head of state, appointed Emmanuel Ijewere to chair the committee that established Value Added Tax (VAT) in Nigeria. Ijewere also worked closely with Akinwumi Adesina, while serving as Nigeria’s Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, in finalising the Agricultural Transformation policy. He also served as a member of the Agricultural Transformation council headed by former President Goodluck Jonathan.
Today, Emmanuel Ijewere, serves as Group CEO of four agribusiness companies: Best Foods Livestock and Poultry limited; Best Foods Fresh Farms Limited; Best Foods Multiconcept Limited and; Naija Pride Agribusiness Limited. Each one is a distinct organisation but operating complementarily with others, in areas such as poultry, abattoir and meat processing, crop production, as well as aggregating and off taking of agricultural commodities, mostly between Northern and Southern Nigeria.
“I came into agriculture by accident,” Ijewere told BusinessDay. Narrating how it happened, he said at the time he was planning to retire from accounting practice after 38 years, when just by accident on the road, he saw people selling and transporting meat on motorcycles, with it resting on their body. He said to himself “This is shameful and unhealthy, with exposure to flies etc and carried on their bodies with equally dirty clothes.” This would usually be around 6pm in the evening and they would have killed the cow in the morning without any preservation. “That anger got me into it, so I got a few friends together and decided to do something about it,” he said.
With this newfound passion, his retirement period dovetailed into a new adventure in agribusiness, and now spanning close to twenty years. Best foods livestock was the first agribusiness company he started, and to get it running, he invited partners with whom he worked to set up a poultry farm for broilers, also setting up a piggery on land acquired in a place called Abijo in Epe Local Government Area of Lagos state.
The company was also fattening cattle for about 2 weeks before slaughter. One of the directors in the company at the time was a veterinarian who was helpful in ensuring international best practices were adhered to. Then, the only abattoir operational in Lagos was the one in Oko-Oba which he says “was an eyesore, although there was a modern one that was never used at that time.” Best Foods built one of the first modern and clean abattoirs in the state, and even though it was not fully automated, operated according to European standards. Part of this included not selling meat within 24 hours after slaughter. The abattoir adopted a system which meant that every time cattle was slaughtered, it was put inside chillers at 4 degrees, before it was de-boned and ready to sell. “It is never from the abattoir to the pot,” he said. With this came the additional cost of providing electricity for refrigeration.
At that time, Ijewere said a litre of diesel was sold for N8.25k, the same diesel is about N240 today, and meanwhile the price of meat has not gone up by that margin, he says. This has been one of the encumbrances in running the livestock processing business, which encompasses beef, pork and chicken, which have to be in cold rooms for 24 hours every day.
Apart from livestock, the crop production arm of Ijewere’s business has thrived through challenging and equally rewarding times. About 19 years ago, Ijewere set up a pineapple farm on 22 hectares of land in Ubiaja, Edo state. From this farm, he was exporting pineapples to the Covent Garden market in the United Kingdom. Every Sunday the flight took off from the Lagos airport at 12 mid day.
He took the pineapples from Edo state to Lagos in trailers, and was meeting the stipulated specifications, but somewhere along the line problems cropped up because first, it took the trailer a very long time to travel because of the bad roads, checkpoints etc. Sometimes the trucks missed the plane, and this meant he was stuck with those cartons of pineapples, and either had to sell them off or they just rot away. Also, because of the difficult nature of the roads, when some of them got to the market in the UK, they come up with complaints that some had already started losing water. That meant they either condemn them or reduce the price drastically, so he discovered that the business was making huge losses on account of this.
Never one to give up without a fight, Ijewere went on to start a pineapple juice company called Sunshine juice. This coincidentally was at a time some big hotel brands were just coming to Nigeria, and they became his biggest buyers. As time went on again, pineapple production, power, machinery, and bottles for packaging required a lot of money and banks, he said, were not interested in financing agriculture. All his investments were coming from his own equity and selling properties to keep them afloat. “At a point, I had 850,000 heads of pineapple on my farm in Ubiaja, Edo state, so I sold everything and got out of the business,” he said.
However, his crop production business did not end there. About five years ago, he started a tomato farm at a place called Igbodu in Epe, bringing his experience from the pineapple production. He has installed 20 greenhouses on the land, for the production of tomatoes, which even though has not fully met his expectations, has become another learning curve in guiding his future investments. He remains a major supplier to some of the biggest retail chains in Nigeria, relied upon to deliver high quality agricultural commodities.
One striking thing about Emmanuel Ijewere during interactions with this reporter is his thirst for knowledge and creating partnerships to make up for any areas he lacked expertise. This appears to have been the secret to his dogged journey in Agriculture for almost 20 years, after an earlier 38 years in Accounting. When he was made pioneer chairman of the Agriculture and Food Security Commission of the Nigeria Economic Summit Group (NESG), he was still new into the sector but his radical approach to making a success of things made him stand out. “In the country of the blind, one eyed man is king, so I became king,” said Ijewere, “but at the same time, I tried looking for the second eye. That was how I trained myself, educated myself, went for trainings, seminars, lectures etc to make up for the knowledge gap.”
It may in fact, not be entirely wrong to describe Emmanuel Ijewere as a serial entrepreneur in agriculture, considering how many ventures he has started within the period of time, some of which he has either sold, wound up, or transformed into new businesses. He is currently Vice President of the Nigeria Agribusiness Group (NABG), a mentor to many established and aspiring agropreneurs, ensuring that like him, none gives up on their dreams to make agriculture prosperous in Nigeria.
CALEB OJEWALE
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