Kelechi Deca
Few days ago, a young lady who was at the Majescity Conference Awka reached out to me with some questions about Dr. Michael Okpara’s agro revolution policies.
She’s a doctoral student at the University of Nigeria. Her first degree is Agric Economics from same UNN, and she confessed that some of the things I spoke about during my speech were new to her.
I understood her predicament.
I told her that if Michael Okpara University of Agriculture lived up to the name of the man the institution was named after. By now they would have developed courses built around Okpara’s agricultural ideas.
History is not just a subject or a course of study. History is life. If you lack the knowledge of history of something, your understanding of that thing is incomplete. From Mathematics to Engineering to Music and Arts.
Okpara’s Pragmatic Socialism was a hybrid socialism that was innovative as at that time and was one of the earliest practices of efficient state capitalism.
His administration adopted very innovative techniques in crop science, animal husbandry and food processing that created value chains to ensure sustainability. The same region that people mock today that they cannot feed themselves achieved self sufficiency in food production within four years.
Take rice for example. Eastern Nigeria’s agrarian revolution turned rice into a major staple of the region. They invested so much into rice production such that by 1965, Abakaliki had become the main rice processing centre in Nigeria.
He established the first state owned poultry farms in the country. That project was so successful that there was excess eggs in the region which led to the One Child One Egg Per Day policy. A child of circumstance, the policy was quickly put in place to mop up surplus eggs from farms.
A little background context should suffice here. In the 40s, 50s, and 60s, consumption of eggs wasn’t a thing Igbo people do. Eggs was seen as a sacrificial object for the gods, not for human consumption.
But ?kpara being a medical doctor also knows that eggs contain essential nutrients for healthy brain development thus launching the One Child One Egg Per Day programme not only ensured the surplus eggs from the poultry were put to good use, it also helped break the jinx surrounding eggs consumption.
That’s a classic example of Culturenomics. The intersection between culture and economics. But if you don’t understand the culture, you won’t know about the economics. Interestingly, history takes you to the culture, and culture explains the economics.
Everything is connected to everything.
People of my generation can attest that eating eggs had a negative ring to it such that parents believed giving kids eggs would turn them into thieves. Chaiiiii, how the world has changed.
I remember reading one of those guys that have invested heavily into historical revisionism say that Ndígbo never had piggeries until few years ago. He was trying to link the growing number of piggeries in Igboland to a sign that we’ve lost our values. I laughed. Who would help educate him that Eastern Nigerian government had piggeries in the early 1960s?
My consolation is that some young people have taken to market gardening in the region and their products are slowly changing the dynamics of food production in the region. Vegetables like Cucumber, Carbage, Spring onions and spices like Ginger are being home grown and with efforts by large scale investors like Nnaemeka Onyeka Obiaraeri and Don Ebubeogu , some day, we will get close.
And not many in the Real Estate sector are aware that at some point in the history of the region, about 75% of the entire materials needed to construct a house were made locally.
Okpara established a corrugated iron sheets manufacturing industry in Port Harcourt. Asbestos and ceiling boards and pipes manufacturing company in Enugu. A metal door and window frames factory in Port Harcourt. A clay bricks making factory in Umuahia. A glass industry in Aba. And also a door mats factory in Aba. Nigeria Cement in Nkalagu and Calabar Cement in Calabar.
We bring the past to the present to help guide us towards the future!
–This article by Kelechi Deca, a journalist and public affairs analyst, was copied from Western Post