Esther Oluku
Former President of Nigeria, Olusegun Obasanjo, has called on the government of Nigeria to expedite action towards restoring peace to farming communities troubled by insecurity saying that insecurity has a negative impact on the country’s food production capacity.
He made these remarks while delivering his address at the 2026 AgriConnectX Summit held in Lagos over the weekend.
According to him, the challenge of insecurity in farming communities rests on the government to address so as to ensure that farmers can peacefully cultivate food for the Nigerian public.
“Today, farmers are in pain in some parts of the country because of insecurity. Some have abandoned their farms. Some are still crying, hoping that when they are producing their crops, some people will not come at gun point and take their crops away.
“Insecurity and agribusiness are strange bed fellows. They don’t go together. So, it’s now incumbent on our government and those who are in authority to make sure that farmers can go to their farm in peace and in security so that they can produce for us adequately and they can produce for us not just enough but at reasonable price,” he said.
Delivering the Keynote address, the Emir of Kano, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, stated that by creating the right infrastructure to support agri-systems and encouraging a value chain that locks in value, the economy will ultimately flourish.
The Emir noted that policy inconsistencies in the agricultural sector weakens investor confidence, erodes trust and wipes out investments. “Opening up the market, which we have done, flooding the market with cheap imported food, is good for the consumer and good for the headlines but it is very bad for the producer.
“It is bad for the banks who lent money to that sector where there would be bad loans. It’s bad for the investors who trusted the system and brought in money to invest in paddies, in fertilizers. in rice mills. We have wiped out billions and billions of wealth. But most important, we have wiped out confidence. It’s going to take us a long time to get people to be confident enough to come back because they do know when next the policy is going to change,” he said.
In his remarks, Co-Founder AgriConnectX and Convener of the event, Temire Bob-Egbe, said that AgriConnectX hopes to close existing gaps in the agribusiness value chain by providing a platform for young people to access markets, get training, mentorship and also to give grants to agribusinesses to enable them scale.