Anambra State Commissioner for Information and Value Reorientation, Dr. Law Okwu Mefor, in this interview, speaks on move by the state government to get investors and partners to develop off-grid electricity generation to drive industrialisation. He also talks on agriculture and investment policies of the Governor Charles Soludo-led administration. Onyebuchi Ezeigbo brings excerpts.
What is the government doing to boost agricultural development in Anambra State?
Yes, the agricultural sector represents one of the priority areas of the state government and the Soludo administration has paid sufficient attention to the sector, and we are doing so in a very intentional and specialized manner. Intentional in the sense that we are not just approaching agriculture generically, we are approaching agriculture from some perspectives that will address some specifics. For example, where it comes to the recovery, recovery of certain economic trees for which the state was once reputed that are now disappearing. Government in the last two to three years has been procuring these seedlings and distributing to people to plant Seedlings like palm, you know, specific palm like coconut, bitter cola, you know, such rare economic plant or cush crops. Yes, the cash crop that are going into extinction, the Solution government is trying to recover them, and because they are rare and very important economic trees, is also envisaged by the time the government achieves that target, those who planted the economic trees – once they start harvesting, it will help them combat poverty itself. Apart from the recovery of these economic trees and stopping them from going into extinction, agriculture is also part and parcel of the programme we are running that we call “One Youth, Two Skills”.
We are encouraging the youths to go into agriculture in all its ramifications. You know, apart from cash crops, animal husbandry, and all aspects of it, people are now, particularly the youths, are now encouraged seriously to go into all of these.
How we do it is that they are trained in their chosen areas of farming, and then they are empowered by giving seed money to be able to practicalize and go into the practice of what they trained in. They want youths to have two skills. Agriculture is not the only thing.
There are other aspects, but I just wanted you to know that it is an integral part of the programme – One Youth, Two Skills. There is another way we deal with agriculture here – through cooperatives, because one of the major hindrances of agriculture anywhere, not just in Anambra State, is that produce is not having off-takers- that you produce you can’t sell. You know, you produce you don’t have access to the market, you know.
So, through cooperative societies, they are encouraged to group themselves according to the sub sectors, so that they are able to access seedlings, fertilizer, access the market and off-takers.
Government is doing this. In fact, to solidify that approach even further, government is working on a law now to formalize the operations of cooperatives in Anambra State, cooperatives and a law for it is now in the making.
On the other hand, the government is intentionally developing rural roads. Most of these farmers are not within urban centers, and their access to urban centers with their produce is what the governor is intentionally tackling by providing access roads to the areas we consider as Anambra food baskets. You know, places like Anyaemelum, Nzam and so on and so forth, places that never had even one meter of hard roads since Anambra state was created. They now have access roads because the governor wants the people there to have access, because if they are able to bring their produce to urban markets, they make more money, and of course, it helps in increasing food supplies generally. And by so doing, prices of these things come down.
We used to have rice as a major produce from Anambra state. What is happening to that sector?
No, no, no. Nothing is happening. We still have Anambra rice. In fact, we now have more of it. Last month, there was an exhibition, a kind of Trade Fair by the Ministry of Commerce and all the produce- things made in Anambra. Much of the exhibition was rice from different parts of Anambra State. In fact, it is such that even areas, areas that hit out to where it did rice production, a number of them towards the Anambra South, never really believed that Anambra South will have much to do. But they came into the exhibition, so the rice is there. Anambra rice is there, and I don’t know whether it is the Ada or other rice. Good, you know, there are other brands. There are now serious industrialists that are even coming into it. Someone like Coscharis Group has now made rice production in Anambra one of his major business concerns. So we are not dropping the ball when it comes to rice production. No, we are doing fairly well in rice production. The only thing that I think we haven’t done well in is processing. So when you produce all these things, you don’t process. If you don’t process, you are not able to go to bank.
Yes, the processing has started, but it hasn’t gotten to the level one would say that we are comfortable, because if we process enough we should be able to service the local market and then export the surplus even beyond Nigeria.
Are there any policy intended to make the state investor friendly?
Yes, there are policies, the philosophy of government is to provide the enabling environment, starting with security, easy access to land, and it’s a protection, electricity, cheap and constant electricity supply. Then, we have some funds that even local entrepreneurs can access. Yes, small and medium scale enterprises can access. We have Anambra State Small Business Agency, where you can access up to 10 million Naira and can recapitalize to do whatever you are doing if the business plan is good. The condition is that you must have something to show for it. It’s not just coming to take money because you want to start something to go into an experiment. We emphasize those who are into something already, so the fund is there.
It’s a deliberate policy to grow local industries, help the small scale businesses to become medium, and large, businesses and then, of course, to bring in external investors. For external investors, the big time ones, the government has created an industrial park, we call it Anambra Mixed Use Industrial City (AMIC) for short. It’s up to 5000 hectares, almost up to five percent of the entire Anambra land area devoted to our industrial park, and the government is providing electricity, access road, security, and all whatnot. And of course, one major thing the governor has done is to get the president to approve that area as a free trade zone. What that means is that those who are into manufacturing can freely bring in raw materials, and then freely also send out whatever they produce from that zone. These are policies that we have on ground, and they are already paying off bountifully.
Electricity is key to industrial development in the state. What is the state doing to boost power supply?
Governor Suludo is a very intentional person, and he’s aware that without cheap and constant electricity supply, that our talk about industrialisation will remain an empty field. He started with a law – the Anambra Electricity Regulatory Act. We have a law which has created a board. The Anambra Electricity Regulatory Board is also in place right now to supervise the electricity market in Anambra and to begin to really do the business of giving people power. They have now commissioned what is called the First Power. It’s a subsidiary of Enugu Electricity Regulatory Commission. They are the ones directly dealing with electricity distribution in Anambra, that is one level of it.
Secondly, Anambra state government is seriously shopping for a means of generating electricity because you don’t give what you don’t have. If you can’t generate, you can’t distribute. You can only distribute what you collect from the center, so we want to go beyond distributing what we receive from the national grid to now begin to generate our own electricity, exploiting the decentralization and devolution of the electricity sector that used to be on the Exclusive List.
So, nobody is stopping you from generating and distributing your own electricity. So, Anambra state government is on that seriously, looking to go into partnerships with the major electricity companies and investors to come to Anambra, the market is there.