By Adagbo Onoja
It is simply impossible to be in Benue State for a whole week as I was recently without feeling embarrassed that a state awash with diverse quality fruits on that scale ever since creation still does not have a functional fruit processing plant. Contemplating that paradox forced one down memory lane on what happened to previous attempts to respond to the challenge.
Aper Aku, first democratically elected governor of Benue State in the Second Republic
The first of such attempts must be the industrialisation strategy of the Aper Aku governorship in the Second Republic when, within the first three years of his first term, Aku established 14 relevant industrial plants, among them Benue Burnt Bricks; Okura Lafia timber factory when present day Kogi was still part of Benue; the soft drinks factory in Makurdi; the beer factory; Lobi Bank; the Taraku Soya Mill.
Unfortunately, the military overthrew the politicians in 1983 and the military administrators posted to Benue State thereafter laboured in the shadows of the big question the Federal Military Government was trying to sort out: to privatise or to commercialise. By the time the Buhari regime opted for commercialisation, it was already close to Golgotha. When Babangida rolled in and chose to auction Nigeria, Aku’s plants were part of the auctioning. Benue lost it.
The second go at it was in 2006/7 and two other times after that when Chief Stephen Lawani sought to be governor of Benue State. An interesting part of that effort was his interrogation of the language game “food basket of the nation” by which Benue State signifies itself. The memorable point there was Lawani’s notion that a food basket suggested a still process instead of a more dynamic process such as food processing factories. In other words, the food basket metaphor did not impress Lawani because nations do not feed from baskets but from what comes out of food processing plants. For him, the idea of food basket lacked the dynamism that should underpin the political economy of food and the food chain. Well, Lawani did not become governor and no one who became governor saw it from the Lawani lens.
The third opportunity was when Senator George Akume became the Secretary to the Government of the Federation with the coming of Bola Tinubu regime. The assumption was that he would use the opportunity to frame the Benue crisis as an agrarian industrial transformation crisis (how else can anyone frame it anyway?). It is possible Akume is still warming up but, so far, what observers have seen is escalation of antagonism among the upper crust of the power elite in the state, with Akume on one side and the incumbent governor on the other.
Is it the case that all the Benue elite with the then Emperor, Gen Muhammadu Buhari could not put up a simple industrial plant to process abundant fruits in Benue between 2015 and 2023, for instance?
What this means is that the state lost each of the three plausible opportunities when an agrarian breakthrough could have been possible. Without such breakthrough, the paradox of over-abundance of fruits has intensified. The fruit market is a defining phenomenon across Benue State but it is a roadside affair, patronised by travelers heading to the east and Southsouth parts of Nigeria through Makurdi, the Benue State capital. Beyond that level of patronage, there is nothing much to write home about. Whichever stock of fruits not sold within that framework perishes.
How did it happen that nearly three decades of unbroken democracy is not enough for any previous government of Benue State to build a world class fruit factory to add value to the abundant supply of fruits in the area? Yet, this is a completely agrarian zone.
It is possible that there might be peculiar snags that those who are distant from government and governance of Benue State in the past few decades may not know of or be in a position to appreciate in terms of building a fruit processing factory. It is equally possible that what was necessary and possible under Aper Aku have become unnecessary and difficult today. One is, however, aware that when a Benue State Commissioner for Agriculture was once asked what the state was doing with the super abundance of fruits in the area, the Commissioner asked back, seeking to know what else anyone does with fruits other than people sucking them. His reply might be where the problem lies, not any difficulty in building a fruit factory.
Again, it is possible that Benue State governor, Hyacinth Alia, has a fruit factory in the pipeline. It is better he does because the absence of a giant fruit processing factory in Benue State up to this point is a scandalous testimonial for all of us, from successive Federal authorities down to anyone who has governed the state since 1999. That’s the most charitable way to sum it up.
While there is no debate about it that Benue State is not in the league of Lagos, Kano, Rivers, Akwa Ibom and even Bayelsa in terms of what these states get by way of federal allocation, the point is what it has to show for the little it got over the years. In this regard, it has basically nothing to show. And yet, there doesn’t appear to be any attempt to overcome this, starting with a reflective session that would facilitate a course-correction process. J. S Tarka must be wailing in his grave if the much we heard about him have any nuggets of truth about them.
