The coronavirus (Covid-19) was a wake-up call for countries who should reprioritise their economic focus in the interests of what was best for the greater good, Nigerian businessman and independent director of NOVA Merchant Bank, Emmanuel Ijewere, said during a webinar earlier today.
Commenting on the crash of crude oil earlier this week when supply outstripped demand, resulting in prices on the futures market falling through the zero-dollar level, Ijewere said: “Nigeria’s future is not in oil, it’s in agriculture.”
And although global industrial interests generally may not agree, another webinar held earlier this week also looked at Africa’s most populous nation, emphasising that oil production only made up 9% of Nigeria’s economy.
Ijewere explained that countries had been playing with fire by over-focusing on market segments which, although serving elevated economic interests such as oil, meant little to most people, especially those living close to the poverty line.
Nigeria, for example, with a population of more than 206 million people, needed to completely retool and reset itself, Ijewere said.
For the most part, he stressed, the country’s oil sector served to create wealth for the government and their corporate partners.
Should the country be able re-focus on the need to feed its population, Ijewere argued, Nigeria could possibly broaden its tax base by up to 60%.
“We need a completely new perspective,” Ijewere said. “The financial sector will have to restructure itself and look at the danger of what it has done wrong in the past.”
This view, Ijewere believes, is reflected in the view of Nigeria’s poor and food-insecure people who say they would rather die of Covid-19 than of hunger.
In Lagos alone, he said, there were 15 million people facing immediate food insecurity.
And although not dismissive of the threat that the pandemic posed to a densely populated country, Ijjewere remarked that most of Nigeria’s people lived “in remote areas and are removed from the virus.
“”They should be allowed to return to work because for them the coronavirus is maybe not as important as the rest of us think.”
As for the argument that Africa’s most pressing need, perhaps now more than ever, is in assuring that its people find access to food, Ijewere said Nigeria held significant potential in terms of having its agricultural sector developed.
“But in this country more than 60% of food produced locally goes to waste because it can’t get to market because of things like bad roads and transportation issues.”
Casting a broader glance at the rest of the continent, Ijewere said the argument that Nigeria had tremendous agricultural potential also held true for the rest of the continent if one considered that more than 60% of the world’s remaining arable land was here in Africa.
