To states, not FG, says Oyo govt
work has to go into understanding how we can have a project or a programme that is sustainable. And as they say, it is better late than never. The government is involved in so many areas such as infrastructural development and so many others. Agriculture happens to be an area where you don’t see the effect immediately. So, the most important thing is the ability of the government to mobilise the people, particularly those of us in the agricultural sector. And I will tell you that before we started this whole process of writing and putting together the vision, we did a lot of consultation. We had to deal with our communities to re-orientate their mindset.
To be able to accommodate the idea of largescale farming, if you understand the sensitivity of land ownership in this part of the world, to get our communities to be able to allow investors to come in and acquire a thousand hectares of land, people who are used to working on just two or three hectares, require a lot of planning, engagement and a lot of persuasion and confidence building among the people. which cattle are moved in and out to support the herders that are moving, because they are usually and permanently on the move. So let us provide them with water turf and a borehole, so that on their way, they can stop with their cattle to get some water. One or two of those have been put in place by the Federal Government within those areas along that line.
All land belongs to the state and the government holds it in trust for the state. So, at the end of the day, the land through which everyone passes still belongs to the state.
In terms of grazing or ranching, we do not have any objection to the establishment of ranching. We see ranching in the state as purely a private sector affair. If the Federal Government or the World Bank has provided some funds to support ranching, it is very welcome. I believe that that kind of fund can be useful to private investors. There are funds for crop production, examples are the cassava production and rice production. Cattle raring or livestock development is also an agricultural development that can also be supported. We already have a law underway in the state house of assemble that is going to guide and regulate the establishment of ranches and development of agricultural activities within the state.
On the whole, we welcome it as part of the agricultural development in the state and this position is also captured within our policy framework. It is true that Oyo State has the second highest number of dams in Nigeria after Kano. Kano probably has more than 24 dams for irrigation purposes. Currently there is no doubt that we are not optimising the usage partly because, most of these dams fall between the purview of the Federal Government through the Ministry of Rater Recourses. I am talking about the River Basin Development Authorities. Most of those dams belong to the Ogun-osun River Basin Development Authority, which is the Federal Government agency. However, what we have done is that we have engaged Ogun-osun river authority on ways which we can reactivate these dams.
The Ogun-osun river basin development authority, probably and other basin development authorities, have their own unique problems. For instance, I know for over one or two years, we have been engaging with them, but they haven’t had a board that can give the necessary direction such that whatever you discuss gets stopped at the management level and we are all stranded. But I am seizing this opportunity to call on the Federal Government, particularly the Minister of Water Resources, to take the more proactive action in reviving and putting in place management structures up to the board level for the river basin development, particularly the Ogun-osun river basin development.
The board is supposed to ordinarily compose of state representatives, a commissioner for agriculture in each of the states that is being served. That would have been able to provide information, and give the push, but till today, that board has not been constituted.
The minister was in Oyo State recently and we took him round the various dams, and the requests which we were asked to forward to Abuja have been forwarded. We will continue to engage the Federal Government until we reach where we can be sure that we revive those dams. I believe we are. We are because we’ve made youth involvement in agriculture our focal point in agriculture. As we speak, we have two programmes targeted at youth development. First, we have Oyo State Agric Initiative which, in collaboration with our local government areas, provides lands, largely for the production of cassava and maize. This has been going on for the last three years and the result have been mixed, I must confess, again due to the peculiarity of our own environment and the youths themselves being able to sustain the support what they were being given.