Photo credit: Medium
If I’m not making a mistake, around the Udoji salary increment awards or thereabouts, most people in the Yoruba states of Nigeria decided they weren’t eating their pepper and tomatoes again.
They felt those commodities were not sweet enough. And, Nigeria being awash with petrodollars, they didn’t find it difficult to be ordering these essential commodities from the north.
That was the beginning of our woes in the southwest, the farms were forsaken since the subsistence farmers were finding their existence impossible because farming was simply no longer profitable for them.
Fast forward to the present, I understand people have devised means of making do with what’s available as far as food is concerned.
I’ve been hearing people using carrots, cucumber and even pawpaw to replace pepper and tomatoes. I even heard several Muslim families had to prepare fried rice instead of the five-star jollof rice we’re used to because pepper was simply unbuyable.
Well, I would think the chickens are coming home to roost. I’ve always preached that if we could plant our own food, that would be the beginning to the end of our problems.
Let’s think of a situation where at least 100 people are settled in farm estates in each local government. The only thing they need to bring to the estate is their tooth brush. All those things they need would have been provided.
Let’s start with each farmer having two hectares of land and some space for livestock, The farmers should be given credit facilities. They should have at least one bedroom apartments. Churches, mosques and even places of traditional worship should be provided. Schools should be provided for their children.
Roads from the farms to the cities should be of vital importance. Meanwhile, preservative schemes like silos should be provided to the farm estates.
On the social side, having a club and internet facilities on the estates wouldn’t be out of place. This might even enable the youths parading the nooks and crannies of the cities looking for white collar jobs to think twice.
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