Agricultural Engineer and Former Adamawa State Secretary to the Government, Dr Umar Bindir, has said that Nigeria’s food security crisis will persist unless reforms extend beyond agriculture to water management, technology deployment and political leadership.
In an interview with ARISE NEWS on Sunday, Bindir said while the current administration is making efforts, food security cannot be treated as the sole responsibility of the Ministry of Agriculture but must involve coordinated reforms across multiple sectors.
“The administration is doing its best. But the issue is food security is not a Ministry of Agriculture thing. Food security is supposed to be the coalition, the partnership, the synergy of many sectors working together.”
He stressed that water management remains the most neglected. “Water management remains the most neglected but critical component of agricultural productivity and rural stability. Managing water resources in this country needs very, very serious reform, adding that productivity across crops, livestock and fisheries depends fundamentally on effective water systems.”
Drawing from his experience in Adamawa State, Bindir said insecurity has evolved beyond direct combat. “We’re now facing what I call communal or community insecurity, I think we have gone over the insecurity of the combat level what most security experts call the kinetic.”
“It is your brother who, if he’s not happy with you, that will organise for people to kidnap you. We documented all these people, their names, their telephone numbers, publishing their contact details for accountability. We produce documentation with their telephone numbers, we shared it to the public, We documented every single element of insecurity as data and then we digitise this.”
“That actually became quite useful.” In this age of AI, this country has to have this kind of data so that you can be able to know things before they happen.”
On infrastructure priorities, he argued that government investment must shift toward large-scale canal systems. “We should also see big canals of transporting water from one point to the other, I think it’s very primitive. The world is laughing at us when every year we celebrate negatively flooding all over the place, killing people, killing animals, destroying communities. We should be able to know where this water is coming from, We should be able to transport this water meaningfully.”
“We should be able to learn also how to store this water and use it when it is needed, Instead of all these high flyovers, let them also have canals that transport water to the communities.”
Addressing the controversy over imported tractors reportedly left unused,Bindir dismissed the notion that mechanisation alone can transform agriculture. “Tractors don’t change your agriculture system and it never pays for itself. Tractor is a power source.”
He warned that policy gaps stem partly from an overconcentration. “In most cases, our governments in this country are infested with macroeconomic people, but we’re very short with people, technical people at the macro level, This country has over 300 universities. We have over 600 research institutions, How come that these engines can produce massively, highly criticalised people to think and it is coexisting with primitive insecurity, primitive poverty. Something is wrong.”
Unless Nigeria understands that you use your intelligentsia leaving the universities on one side and ensuring that you are implementing your programmes on one side, that is not a very good equation, We should mine our intelligentsia to be able to tackle some of these things.”
“We should mine our intelligentsia to be able to tackle some of these things, value chain of politics. We don’t close our eyes to say, God, give me leadership so that I can be able to change people’s lives, We just open our eyes to say that I must be this, or this man must be that.”
On the possibility of political realignments in Adamawa State, he suggested that leaders should align with viable platforms. “If I were him, I would have done it a long time ago, to actually continue the kind of good projects that he has started, I think he should lean towards a winning flow so that he can be able to continue.”
“But these things are very difficult to understand by ordinary people, I just wish him well. Wherever he goes, he has started well, as far as I’m concerned.”
Erizia Rubyjeana
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