• Friday, March 29, 2024
businessday logo

BusinessDay

As CBN’s Emefiele bemoans N-billion spent on palm oil importation

Oil palm farmer

So? One would wonder if the palm oil industry value chain is the only segment of the agricultural sector that exhibits such a huge demand/production gap. The Goodluck Jonathan administration had led a largely unacknowledged intervention in rice. After first denying and upsetting the work of Akinwunmi Adesina for about a year, Audu Ogbe and his boss finally woke up and resumed to build on that foundation. Good. Then it claimed all the credit. No problem! We must move on, right?

Now, does the Buhari administration and the current leadership at the Central Bank have access to the records concerning the efforts over the past 30 odd years to keep pace with the demand for crude palm oil via local husbandry? I doubt it. Apparently CBN Gov Godwin Emefiele has not gotten himself fully briefed. Otherwise instead of lamenting to the Nigerian public, he would have been telling us what was done during his (yes) brief tenure and the previous ones in supporting the work of committed organizations like Okomu Oil PLC and Presco PLC. There are others, but these two are the major players. Unlike in the case of rice, the lead time from planting to harvesting and processing is in the neighborhood of seven years. This is not your typical glamorous activity where the initiator government gets to harvest to the wild adulation of the adoring masses. Emefiele should have done a proper homework instead of disturbing our peace.

I concede that Emefiele regaled his audience with a historical excursion to the 1950s and 60s. That was a useless exercise in the light of the work at hand. In 1958 my late father worked hand in hand with the operators of the Eastern Nigeria Regional Bulk Oil Plants, in Port Harcourt, Igwenga Opobo (now Ikot Abasi) and a couple of other locations. These comprised actual tank farms of Palmoil. All these were ruined during the war. Emefiele and most of his listeners were probably not born then. Since the narrative must have sounded like ancient history, the CBN Governor would have better spent his time discussing the misadventures of the 1980s to 1990s when the governments of the day declared interest in advancing the Palmoil industry, only to renege on its unforced promises to protect the growers. There is no reason why Okomu Oil Plc and Presco Plc together with the others would today not have say three times the current acreage and production, with the appropriate processing capacity for the higher yield. All the growers had developed cold feet immediately the government started granting all sorts of waivers to its friends to bring in bulk crude and refined Palmoil under all sorts of funny names.

That government policy flip-flop prompted the banks, bad lenders even in the best of circumstances, to pull their tattered cover. New and tentative entrants in the industry collapsed. The name of Ferdinand Industries PLC keeps resounding in my mind. .  Are we going to have a repeat? Who knows?

If Emefiele understands the sector, there is so much he should have done before this public outing. I doubt if most of the investing public will put much premium on those statements prefaced with, “We will . . .”

Once beaten, they say, twice shy!

The other issue of bad governance and debilitating interference by the various state administrations that hobbled the Risonpalm, Adapalm, Ohaji palm, Ile-Oluji Palm, etc, of this world is a story for another day. State governments in the southern Rainbelt suited for palm oil cultivation should stay out of the business. They must concentrate on humanely removing as many obstacles as possible inhibiting land acquisition by the prospective investors. The Land Use Decree/Act comes to mind. We must however recognize that the high population density in the Rain Belt complicates this matter. Production of other food and cash crops must not be compromised. But confront it, we must.

 

Oduche Azih

 

Azih Writes from Ikeja, Lagos