Untold Stories

Can emirs help restart farming?

David Hecht, for the Pulitzer Center

 

Food production in Nigeria is not keeping pace with population growth. The question is why? The country is not lacking in arable land and has not had a major drought for many years. So maybe the reason has something to do with changes to the way Nigerian societies are organized.

The country is a federation of states. In northern Nigeria, where food shortages are most acute, the society is organized into Muslim states known as Emirates, which were ruled by Emirs under colonialism. But since Nigeria’s independence, though the Emirs still hold sway, each emirate also has its own state governments, which are responsible for passing laws and allocating resources.

I talked with Sani Abubakar Lugga, the chief advisor, or Wasiri, to the Emir of Katsina about problems of food production. Below are excerpts from that interview

HECHT: Have the Emirs traditionally played a role in food production?

WASIZI: Before the advent of Islam -- I am talking about a thousand years ago -- the kings of Hausaland were the primary movers of agriculture -- food production and livestock as well as crops like cotton used to produce cloth. The term Emir only came about after the Sokoto caliphate Jihad (1809) to purify Islam [at which time] the pagan kings were made Emirs.

HECHT: So how did these Hausa kings of old encourage farming?

WASIZI: If you look at the cities of the old kingdoms, like Kano and Katsina, you will see they all have [protective] walls. And the town walls at that time were an enclosure of not only the residences of people but of their farmlands as well. That was to ensure that, even during tribal and inter-communal wars, enough food was being produced. So that even in the advent of a raid, one town could [withstand a seige] for four or five months because they had all their farmlands and livestock within the enclosure.

HECHT: Did colonization change all that?

Conversation with economist Shuaibu Idris

David Hecht, for the Pulitzer Center

In my last blog entry I wrote about the many commercial farms in northern Nigeria that have failed. I wrote that my visiting them did not help me much in fathoming what went wrong with them all. But I have since gotten more clues from talking with various experts such as Shuaibu Idris a development economist and the Executive Director of Dangote Flour Mills. He talked to me about some of the local and international constraints that big farmers face as well as the constraints faced by small peasant farmers. He also points to the potential risks that the country’s dysfunctional food production system poses for food security in Nigeria, as well as for surrounding countries. Here are excerpts from our conversation:

HECHT: How much of the wheat you mill at Dangote Flour Mills is produced in Nigeria?

IDRIS: None, unfortunately. Nigeria imports about 3 million metric tons annually. There were times in the 1980s and 1990s when we produced noticeable quantities. And government supported farmers by insisting that a portion of what we millers milled was grown locally. There was even a period when Nigeria banned the importation of wheat completely and indeed bread was produced in Nigeria. But Nigerian government policy has not been consistent and midway through the program it was jettisoned. So we went back to the drawing board. Today there are some farmers who still grow a little wheat but it is not even enough to be captured in national statistics. So for our purposes Nigeria produces none.

Paralyzed

David Hecht, for the Pulitzer Center

I first came to the dry, remote north of Nigeria 25 years ago on a rather strange holiday to visit a Dutchman I knew who had the job of managing a commercial farm there. The farm owner was Usman Dantata, a member of one of Nigeria’s wealthiest families. Besides 2,000 hectares of land for cereals, cotton and rows and rows of industrial chicken coops, Dantata’s property had a private airstrip, three mansions for each of his three wives, plus two teams of polo horses, some of which I got to ride.

Finding the farm again was pretty easy. From Kano, the regional capital in the north, I hired a driver to take me south to Tiga Dam, which I knew to be the source of water used for the farm’s irrigation system. From there we soon came across Anadariya Farms as the property was called, but already from the roadside I could see it had long ago been abandoned. I recognised the skeletons of the chicken coops, fuelling station and staff housing were I had stayed. Tractors, combine harvesters and silos were rusting away.

I was not really surprised. Countless mechanized farms in northern Nigeria are now abandoned. I visited another 2,000-hectare farm near Tiga that the Dantata family had sold to the late military dictator Sunny Abacha. It too was no longer functioning. Nor is a 5,000-hectare property in Katsina State, Sambo Farms, which had at one time been managed by Nigeria’s current president Umaru Yar’Adua.

Nigeria: Durbah Festival images

David Hecht, for the Pulitzer Center

Durbah festival at Katsina December 8, 2008
Photo credit: David Hecht

During the annual Durbah festival, over the period of Eid, the various district heads of each Emirate come to their Emir to show their strength in warriors and horsemen and to demonstrate that they are ready to defend his realm.

In former days, farmers would also seek to demonstrate their capacity in food production. The most productive farmers would be rewarded with courtly titles. But the role of the Emir is now largely symbolic; he can no longer offer incentives to increase production.

Nigeria: One reason for low productivity

David Hecht, for the Pulitzer Center

This weekend Nigerian journalist Abubakar Kabir Matazu invited me to drive with him and his children to his home town of Katsina in the far north of Nigeria to celebrate the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha. Katsina is known as a ancient center of Islamic learning and Eid is the day thousands of brightly regaled horsemen parade before the Emir (see photos in my next posting). However I wanted to go to meet Matazu's father Alhaji Kabir Matazu, who is what one might call a middle class Nigerian farmer, and he is struggling. 

Matazu senior is a former military officer who has acquired almost 1000 acres of land, a tractor and modern farm machinery and was very productive in the 1980s and 90s. But the machinery mostly sat in the shed this year, he said, and most of his land lay fallow. "The costs of fertilizers and other inputs were too high," he explained. And what is so sad is that in 2008  the rains were good in the north and there were bumper harvests. Nevertheless he said he lost less money than farmers who were more productive. "The cost to grow crops were some 50 percent more than the price the farmers got for their crops," he said. Thus the more a farmer produced the more money he lost. 

Matazu's father blames the government.

Nigeria: Massacre in Jos

David Hecht, for the Pulitzer Center

I arrive in Nigeria with news that hundreds of people
have been killed in the town of Jos as a result of fighting between
Muslims and Christians. There hasn't been a major outbreak of
so-called "religious violence" in Nigeria for years and it was looking
like a problem of the past. But the violence has always come as
somewhat of a surprise and a mystery.

When I was in Jos earlier in the year I had seen how hard religious
and ethnic leaders had worked to mend divisions and change ways people
thought of each other.

What has undoubtedly continued, however, is that Muslim nomadic cattle
herders mostly from the Fulani ethnic group have moved south because
of desertification in the north into the more fertile Middle Belt
around Jos increasing competition for land there with the mostly
Christian crop farmers.

Even so, the latest fighting has been in urban areas. It comes on the
heels of local elections in which, as often happens in Nigeria, the
results are suspected of being fraudulent. Moreover observers say
political leaders had been whipping up tensions between their
supporters for months. Muslims in Jos tend to support the opposition
All Nigerian Peoples Party (ANPP) while Christians mostly support the
ruling People's Democratic Party (PDP).

This political division has had little to do with people's religious
beliefs and more to do with the peculiar way in which the Nigerian
state has two classes of citizens in any particular part of the
country. One group of citizens are considered "indigenous" and get
preferential treatment while the other group are considered
"settlers". In Jos the populations who are Hausa, Fulani and other
northern Muslim ethnic groups are the settlers even though many have
lived in Jos for generations and consider much of the Middle Belt to
be part of their homeland .

Now observers, especially journalists, are looking out for violence
elsewhere in NIgeria, notably in the home towns of the victims where
funerals have typically ignited retaliatory violence.

(David Hecht is in Nigeria on a Pulitzer Center grant, reporting on food security.)