By Abdulrahman A. Abdulrauf
Abuja
The Ooni of Ife Kingdom in Osun state, Oba Adeyeye Enitan Ogunwusi, Ojaja II, has described Nigeria as a sleeping nation that should wake up from its slumber and sufficiently feed itself without external support.
He said, besides being the most populous black nation, Nigeria is well endowed such that whatever a produce that comes out from its environment is always the best world over.
The royal father spoke as Keynote Speaker at the 2017 Mike Omotosho Annual Lecture, themed “Increase Agricultural Productivity for Sustainable Economic Growth”, recently in Abuja.
The monarch, who spoke extempore, expressed his passion for agriculture and told the audience how he was able to mobilise the army of unemployed youth in his kingdom into farming.
He said: “Agriculture is something I am very passionate about. I just don’t talk the talk, but I walk the talk. Food is a necessity which everybody needs. God has endowed us with the best weather in tropical region. Agriculture is key to nation-building.”
Underscoring the place of agriculture in the nation’s development, the royal father noted that “two third of our flag shows agriculture, we do not have the sign of oil and gas. When last did we touch our soil? We have abandoned all this and that is why we are where we are today. This is a sleeping nation.”
Recalling how proceeds from groundnut/groundnut oil in the North, cocoa in the South-west and palm oil in the then Midwest were used to service the nation’s oil exploration, Oba Adeyeye said “as custodians of African tradition and most populous black nation, we need to rediscover ourselves because something is fundamentally wrong with us as a people.”
While saying that government alone cannot do it, the monarch challenged Nigerians to focus on the nation’s diversity in all spheres of life to navigate out of the present recession.
“Our diversity is our strength. This nation must be together and we must focus on our diversity. Coca cola is made from kola nut, same with gum Arabic which we have in abundance. God has designed this nation, what is left for us is to work on it.
“Everyone shouts that dollar is going up and my question to them is, do we use dollar on the farm? No, rather what we need is labour. Is it not an irony that prices of agricultural produce are going up and that of oil is going down?
“I am a very practical person. Plant cocoa which has gestation of three years and support it with banana and ugwu, both of which have shorter gestation. And the luck we have is that anything coming out of our soil is always the best. Name it, crude oil, banana, plantain, and our grains,” he added.
