By Owei Lakemfa
Alhaji Tanimu Yakubu was Special Adviser
on Economic Matters to President Umaru Musa Yar’adua. Before becoming one of
Nigeria’s best Presidents in our leadership-challenged country, Yar’Adua was
Governor of Katsina State and TY, as Yakubu is fondly called, was one of his
cabinet members for three years from 1999.
When TY was preparing that administration’s first budget in Katsina State, he studied the past trends in the government support for agriculture. He discovered that annually, 80 per-cent of the agriculture budget was allocated for fertilizer procurement.
Given the fact that there are a number of
clearly identified necessities of agriculture, he decided to research why
fertilizer alone was consuming four fifths of the agriculture budget.
He appointed consultants to carry out a survey amongst farmers in the state to generate a list of their actual needs; they were 20 items. Then, a second stage of the survey was carried out for the farmers to rank those needs from the most to the least important. The result was shocking. The farmers listed fertilizer as the 13th in their list of their needs! Desertification was ranked number one, extension service, two and market/profitability, three. The farmers did not even identify subsidy as a requisite.
