Nigeria stands to benefit more from inter-regional trade because we are a bigger country and the largest economy in Africa as well as West Africa, said Bismarck Rewane, managing director/CEO of Financial Directives Co. Nig. Ltd.
Rewane said this in Lagos on Tuesday at the event organised by Rotary District 9110 to commemorate the 2020 World Peace and Understanding Day with the theme: ‘Promoting World Pace and Understanding through Food Security.’
Rewane, who described border closure as a temporary measure, which led to spike in prices of certain products due to supply gap in the country, stated that it is in Nigeria’s own best interest to open up the borders in order to dominate those markets.
According to him, the border closure would not be definite because the Federal Government would open it again after addressing the concerns it has with the neigbouring West African countries.
“We will likely see inflation going up to 13 or 13.5 percent because the current food inflation will be here with us till the next two to three months before Nigerians would begin to see decline in food inflation,” he said.
While drawing a line between insecurity and high prices of food, Rewane pointed out that insecurity is not just a northern phenomenon due to insecurity other parts of the country including Niger-Delta.
According to him, the discovery of oil in the 60s has led to the neglect of the Agric sector such that Agric sector barely expands above 3.0 percent in recent times while its contribution to GDP fell from above 60 percent in the 1960s to 25.16 percent in 2019.
“We talked about water pollution, which affects fishing and other aquatic lives, we also talked about deforestation and desertification but the only way to deal with these issues is to increase the level of investments, equity in the distribution of opportunities and income so that the environment would be much more peaceful for growth to thrive,” he stated.
On his view, Mezuo Nwuneli, managing partner, Sahel Capital Agribusiness Managers Ltd, said that border closure is a mixed-bag in the sense that some sectors such as rice and poultry have benefited from the closure while other Nigerian farmers and manufacturing companies, who rely on export to thrive, are presently losing out.
Nwuneli, who stated that Nigeria would continue to have more poor and hungry people over a period of time, pointed out that Nigeria needs to broadly distribute growth without concentration on growth driven by Lagos and Abuja alone.
He said that distributing growth would discourage or reduce the high rate of urban migration.
Nwuneli stated that an average Nigerian spend about 56 percent his or her income on food, which is high when compared with South Africa and others, adding that such limits income at hand.
He listed seedling, low mechanisation, poor irrigation and availability of infrastructure as issues affecting agricultural productivity in Nigeria. “It is important to incorporate technology into agriculture to boost productivity and increase efficiency,” he said.
Larry Agose, chairman planning committee for the World Peace and Understanding Day, said that it is only when government does the right thing by ensuring that there is good farming, storage and irrigation system to have food security.
AMAKA ANAGOR-EWUZIE
