Nigeria’s Oil And Irish Potato

Irish Potato as a Replacement for Oil in Nigeria
NOVEMBER 6, 2014

By Ademola Adegbamigbe AgriNigeria News

The financial difficulty Nigeria experiences at present reminds me of the Irish, their potato and the famine that hit them like a stiletto, scattering them into the four winds. Between 1845 and 1852, what was popularly referred to as the Irish Potato famine killed over one million people. Worse still, the famine made over a million others to emigrate to the Americas, Australia, Africa, and elsewhere.

Cause of their problem was the introduction of this staple. Before the introduction of potato to Ireland, the people fed on butter, milk and grain products. Initially, potato was food for the “big people” but it later stole its way into the homes of peasants, overtaking what it met on the dining table.

In his book, Beyond Beef, Jeremy Rifkin (1993), wrote that the Celtic grazing lands of Ireland had been used to pasture cows for centuries. The British, as he argued, colonised the Irish, transforming much of their countryside into an extended grazing land to raise cattle for a hungry consumer market at home .

He stated further: “The British taste for beef had a devastating impact on the impoverished and disenfranchised people of Ireland, pushed off the best pasture land and forced to farm smaller plots of marginal land.”

Thus, the Irish turned to potato, a crop which, as Rifkin put it, could be grown abundantly in less favourable soil. Eventually, cows took over much of Ireland, “leaving the native population dependent on potato for survival”.

However, there was a mistake in the introduction of that agricultural product into Ireland. According to a scientific report, lack of genetic variation in the Irish potato made the famine severe. In other words, when it was attacked by blight, the Irish suffered for relying too much on monocropping.

Nigeria and Ireland share a few things in common in “monoculture”. Just as the British made the Irish to abandon their original food, rely on devastated grazing land to raise (monocropping) potato, the imperialists came to Nigeria and sheepishly we abandoned what used to fetch us revenue (especially in the area of agriculture) to depend on oil.

Now our oil has been attacked by its own brand of potato blight – low revenue – as a result of fall in international price of crude, a development which has been affecting all the 36 states, the Federal Capital Territory and the Federal Government, itself the dispenser of scarce resources.

States are no longer given their allocation as and when due, and when they receive, it is always lower than they are usually given.

In the middle of last month, Governor Raji Fashola of Lagos revealed at the World Food Day and agriculture value chain empowerment in Lagos that insufficient funds in the Federation Account made the Federation Accounts Allocation Committee, FAAC, meeting in Enugu to be postponed. If the commissioners for finance in all the 36 states who usually attend such meetings had gone to Enugu to collect what was due for them in September, what they would have shared was N400 billion rather than the N600 billion budget benchmark monthly.

The situation was so bad in September that, as reported by Thisday, the Department of Petroleum Resources “can only rake in N59 billion… the lowest it generated in the last two years”. It added that other revenue generating agencies have not been able to meet up.

This problem started from three sources. First, the discovery of shale oil and its wide usage in the United States made Nigeria to lose that big market in its oil exports. In 2006, Nigeria’s export of crude oil to the U.S. was 1.3 million barrels per day. This reduced to 0.5 million in 2012 and later, 100,000.

The other reason is the reduction in oil exploration by companies like ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, Total and Chevron. This, as The Guardian reported recently, caused Nigeria’s “persistent failure to meet its cash-call obligations in upstream joint ventures with oil majors”, putting the country in a deficit of $60 billion. Also, there is the fall in the price of crude oil in the international market. Now, it hovers around $81.

Meanwhile, the Federal Government, as a result of this, has vowed to embark on some cost-cutting measures, like collapsing certain overlapping agencies, a development that may lead to shedding of staff weight.

Nigeria needs to grow out of its mono-economy or dependence on only oil. When we were growing up, our primary school textbooks contained photographs of groundnut pyramids in the North; bags of cocoa from the West and barrels of palm oil from the South-East and South-South.

The states should not leave the matter of agriculture revival to the Federal Government and vice versa. Rather, the two should match in lock-step to make Nigeria regain its glory as a net exporter of agricultural products.

Industrialisation is another way of travelling out of our mono economy. And this should begin from the oil sector itself. It is an irony that Nigeria, a crude oil producer, should import refined petroleum products! In fact, the revelation by the Minister of Petroleum Resources, Diezani Alison-Madueke, that Nigeria would import petroleum products for 20 years is not reassuring.

Another opportunity is in the abundance of human resource in Nigeria. To tap this, the education sector must not be neglected. Rather, it needs adequate funding to produce a crop of engineers, inventors, industrialists and other professionals who will later pay hefty taxes and others.

Dependence on oil may make Nigeria suffer like the Irish when blight hit their potato.