By MajiriOghene Etemiku
As part of what I do in my spare time, and in line with my belief
that the earth is the Lord’s with the fullness thereof, I tend a farm in my
compound. On that little farm, I cultivate shallow rooted crops like maize,
watermelons, tomato and pumpkins leaves and manage a mini poultry. Every
morning after my family wakes up and finish with our prayers, we descend on our
farm. And on weekends I would gather the whole family together to weed
the farm, tend and water our crops. While in the farm, the feeling is akin to
obedience to a holy injunction that we should till the earth, subdue and take
care of it.
*Buhari |
Some of my friends and
colleagues who have seen my farm are pleasantly surprised at the emerald
effervescence of my maize, melon and pumpkin. They have no idea that I had
taken the trouble to visit the ADP in Benin
City for healthy seedlings which I understand can be
harvested in three instead of six months it takes for crops to mature. I know
that Nigerians are a laid-back lot, preferring to import food rather than grow
it. My wife has happily taken to harvesting pumpkin and water leaves from this
farm with which she prepares the family’s favourite – vegetable soup.
I don’t joke with my
farm. I am my farm, my farm is me. Even though it is not as large and as
capital-intensive as the Obasanjo Farms, I take great pride in it. I see myself
as a metaphor for the thousands in my village Uzere who have invested time,
money and their lives into eking a living from the land like our ancestors.
Touch my farm, go near it and you would be looking for trouble. I remember growing
up as a child in Uzere – that I ate so much fish and so much kpokpo gari to the extent that it seemed like paradise.
Over the years,
however, as a result of the activities of the Nigerian government and its
cohorts, the multinationals that prospect for oil to feed Nigeria , nearly
every piece of land and river has been polluted. The pawpaw trees are dead, the
cassava, the yams are not growing anymore and that is because the soil is
soaked with crude oil. The rivers where we once took a haul of shrimps and
baskets of eba and ero fishes, where we once took our bath
and drinking water are all dried up. In their places are artificial lakes, aka
burrow pits that have dislocated the aquatic balance of our community. When it
rains, we dare not drink the water, and that is because gases that have been
flared since 1957 in
my village coagulate and return as gooey residue on the pots and pans which we
put outside to collect the rain water. These were the issues that Ogoni leader,
Kenule Saro-Wiwa, took head on, and which his predecessor Isaac Adaka Boro
championed before they were killed.