The
co-founder and former Chief Operating Officer, Crest Agro Products Limited,
Leonard Ebute, 38, shares how the youths can become agricultural entrepreneurs
and
how Nigeria can make big gains from agriculture in this interview
with
JESUSEGUN ALAGBE
You
held various positions at multinationals like Kimberly Clark, Sanofi-Aventis
and Nestlé Nigeria Plc. What made you quit these lucrative jobs to venture into
agriculture?
I’ve always
seen problems in value chain in the agricultural space and sought to fix them.
I believe the flip side of every problem is opportunity and solving problems
commands value. It was easy to spot problems in the agricultural sector because
I believe the big businesses of tomorrow will be solving social issues such as
unemployment, and not just aiming for profit. Many years ago, I saw agriculture
as the vehicle to achieving that. The transition into agriculture was not very
difficult for me. I was prepared, I had plenty years to prepare. I had always
wanted to be an entrepreneur and I knew that at a point in my life, I was going
to be on my own. Also, at the outset, my business partners knew that I had a
great career and family, so they made my pulling out as easy and less stressful
as possible. Talking about my career, Nestlé was very exciting; a lot of what I
am doing now came as a result of the opportunities seen there. The training I
underwent and the projects I did there prepared me for what I am doing now, so
it was easy to combine that experience with my knowledge of agriculture and the
economy to create what I’m doing now in agriculture.
So at
what exact point did you think your time was up in those companies?
The
moment I made my presentation to the investment bankers funding the project and
it was obvious that they were going to fund it. They asked me if I would be
willing to leave my ‘lucrative’ jobs when they needed me, I assured them
that I wasn’t just going to be willing, but I would be happy.
That
means you had been working on the project even while in those companies?
Yes, the
business plan was written while I was there and the business was already
running over the years at Kimberly Clark, Sanofi-Aventis and Nestlé. I was just
waiting to join. I left Nestlé in 2013 and then went to Sanofi-Aventis as Head
of Procurement, East and West Africa; I eventually left there for Kimberly
Clark as Head of Supply Chain, East, West and Central Africa. That was also
very exciting for me because Kimberly Clark was setting up a business for East,
West and Central Africa and they needed pioneers to head functional units, so
it was an opportunity to learn how to do it. I was there for two years and left
March 2016 to resume at Crest Agro.
When
you finally decided to quit those jobs, was there any opposition from family and
friends, especially your wife?
No, I
think I had cured my family of that kind of worry a long time ago. I have
always been adventurous. They knew me. I am a biker, I used to climb mountains
while in Jos and I hope to go into ski diving someday. I think my family
trusted me with the decision. I had always taken up challenges even when all
the odds were against me. My parents died before I finished secondary school
and I barely had enough money when I resumed at the University of Jos, not even
enough to pay for registration. I couldn’t afford to buy a single handout while
in the university. When I could finally afford it through some scholarships
that I received, I was already used to not buying, but I thank God I still
graduated top of my class. God has helped me to achieve things when the odds
were stacked against me. For example, in the value chain that we’re trying to
do business in, there is no success story in Nigeria, and the question we ask
ourselves is, what makes us smarter than the guys who had failed there?
However, we don’t bother ourselves about the guys who failed. It is about what
we need to do to succeed.
There
are perhaps millions of unemployed youths out there who would tell you they
would have started their own businesses too, but for no capital. Did you
experience the finance problem while starting out?
I didn’t
have any capital, too. The reality is that capital is not about money alone.
It’s mainly about intellectual property. The truth is that the world is full of
loose funds and the owners of those funds are looking for who to give, but
because the owners of those funds are not politicians who have stolen
government money, they would not dump them on a project that they cannot see
its viability. For example, when I started conceiving of Crest Agro, I was
trying to do my job at Nestlé as a supply chain person. I saw a supply chain
problem and I was trying to fix that problem. But then, I discovered that
Nestlé couldn’t fix that supply chain problem, it had to be an independent
business and so my thinking was how should that ideal business look like? So I
started painting a picture of what that ideal business would look like. I knew
all the operational aspects of what that ideal business would look like, but I
didn’t know the business side, the financial side and the investment side. I
didn’t know how to source for funds, how to structure a deal. So I went to the
Lagos Business School and enrolled for a Master of Business Administration and
in the first year of my MBA, I perfected all of these sides. In every class, I
asked lots of stupid questions because I had an agenda. It was at the end of my
first year that I presented my business plan to the investors. My point is,
what you lack you should actively seek for. If you don’t know the specific
people that can fund your business, that’s a knowledge gap and you have to
seek for it. The youths should stop saying there is no money; they should just
say they don’t know the people who can fund their businesses and then begin to
investigate.
Why do
you strongly believe the future of Nigeria is agriculture?
Nigeria
has no reason to be poor. Let me throw some numbers to give you some level of
perspective: Today, in terms of production, Nigeria is the fourth largest
producer of vegetable in the world; the Netherlands is 26th. But when it comes
to export, the Netherlands generates the same revenue from fresh vegetables
that Nigeria would generate from oil if we were to be producing 1.2 million
barrels per day at $50. How much are we, the number four vegetable producer,
generating from export? Zero! Let me give you another scenario. Oil sells at
around $50 per barrel. The equivalent of a barrel is 137 kilogrammes. Now,
137kg of Irish potatoes is worth around $178, meaning that the amount generated
from the sale of a barrel of oil is far lesser than what you will get selling
the same quantity of Irish potatoes. Why then should Plateau State be poor?
That’s the only state in Nigeria where you can produce Irish potatoes between
three and four cycles per year. Why is Akwa Ibom State proudly an oil-producing
state and Plateau State is not much more proud as an Irish potato-producing
state? The reason is simple — there is zero export, there is zero government
focus in converting that value chain into real dollars. The way we have petrol
dollars, we should also be talking of Irish potato dollars. Mambila Plateau
[Taraba State] is also the only place that has the weather required for
temperate vegetable crops to grow. It is the most fertile land for growing
crops. However, 80 per cent of Mambila is uncultivated. Rather, the place is
owned by a lot of ex-military people. They have farms here and there, but no
farming is going on. Those lands hold the key to Nigeria’s economic growth. Let
me talk about Benue State. It is the largest producer of soya bean in Nigeria
and the largest producer of cassava in the world. Both Benue and Kogi states
account for a chunk of all the cassavas produced globally. Talking about soya
bean, there is no single farm of soya bean in the whole of Benue State that is
up to 10 hectares, which means you cannot mechanise production when the scale
is that tiny. Soya bean can be produced there strictly for export to make soya
dollars, but the government, as it is set up now, does not think that way. Now
talking about cassava, the local demand for its starch alone is nearly 400,000
metric tonnes per annum whereas the local supply is less than 10,000 metric
tonnes. Note that we’re not talking about export yet. The Middlebelt, which is
currently the poorest part of Nigeria, is supposed to be by far the richest.
States like Benue should be lending money to Akwa Ibom and Bayelsa states;
states like Kaduna, Niger, Kogi, Kwara and others around the Guinea Savannah
region where almost every crop can grow, should not be talking of poverty. And
they have so much land. The untapped land in Kogi State alone can create five
Lagos cities. Niger State is even worse. My point is that these states all have
areas where they can be competitive, but because the Federal Government shares
money from oil proceeds, the states are becoming lazy, which is why personally,
I agree with the Niger Delta boys that the resources of a place should be
controlled by that place. The Federal Government should only collect royalties
and regulate the use of that revenue. Think of it this way: Assuming all the
oil revenue produced by Akwa Ibom State resides there, the state would have had
the capacity to become another Lagos, meaning that Lagos will not be as
congested as it is. My only problem, however, with the Niger Delta boys is
their approach of agitation. What they are asking for is like a man whose
father owns the whole world but is only fighting for bread. What they are
asking for is juvenile compared to the scope of what they should be asking for,
and the manner in which they are making their demands is like a child
defecating in his father’s bedroom because the uncle collected the house. By
the time the house is finally given to the child, he will have to clean up his
mess. The Niger Delta boys are bombing pipelines and desecrating the
environment, not realising it’s their environment they are messing up. They are
saying the oil is their own, but they are destroying the facilities. If
something is yours, why would you destroy it? They wouldn’t be fighting with
this approach if they realised the oil is theirs. Right now, they are worse
than politicians and that is why the rest of the world cannot take them
seriously because what they are doing is not agitation, it’s a criminal
activity. Be that as it may, their agitation is genuine because for instance,
does the revenue Kano State is generating from groundnut being shared with
Bayelsa State? Is the revenue Benue making from soya shared among the other
states? Why then should we be sharing oil revenue produced by some among
others? Why can’t we allow the coastal areas enjoy certain benefits like access
to the sea, concentrate the resources there, build mega cities around there so
that they too can build their own ‘Lagos?’ Every family is represented in and
benefits from Lagos. Imagine if we have five ‘Lagos,’ Nigeria would have
developed and then the governors from the Middlebelt will stop being lazy and
then they will see that they are by far the richest states in Nigeria. The
richest state in the United States is California. They’ve got no oil, but they
built their economy around Silicon Valley based on technology and knowledge.
But in Nigeria, which state will you say is a knowledge-based economy? What we
have are oil-producing states and others are nothing-producing states. It’s
ridiculous.
Do you
think restructuring would solve the problem of laziness among state governors?
That is
what federalism is supposed to be. Federating units are supposed to be
autonomous but not independent. We borrowed a US model and then adulterated it.
Part of that adulteration is from history. There was a war and after the war,
[General Yakubu] Gowon needed to have more powers at the centre to be able to
rebuild, which was logical. But we forgot when the war was over that we had to
be federal again. When we talk about restructuring, it is not what we want to
do, it’s something that was and we moved away from it. It is a constitutional
provision that we are a Federal Republic of Nigeria and that the federating units
would have self-governing autonomy. This is why we vote to elect our leaders.
Nigeria is probably one of the few places in Africa where democracy ought to
work because democracy works where you have a diverse population. When you have
a homogenous population, you don’t need democracy, you need a king. For
instance, if Saudi Arabia ventures into democracy now, their system will
crumble. But for democracy to work in Nigeria, the people need to have
self-governing bodies. The reason why everybody wants to be at the centre is
because the peripheries have been stripped of powers. The governors are
subservient to the president, this ought not to be so. In the US, governors
sometimes refuse to obey certain federal laws and enact their own laws to
override federal laws. This is what true democracy in a federal system is
supposed to look like. The president is not supposed to be king. For instance,
the governor of Illinois in the US does not command as much resources as the
mayor of Chicago, even though he is a governor. It is just like saying a local
government chairman controlling more resources than the governor of a state in
Nigeria. This is what federalism ought to bring. When this happens, people will
look inwards and think of how to build their communities and not depend on the
Federal Government. With our current faulty system, someone can just bring
their brother from the United Kingdom, sponsor and make him the governor of the
state. Why? Because the people don’t need to know you before you can get there.
But where there is federalism and people own their immediate environment, no
candidate can ever be imposed on them. Look at councillors in Nigeria today,
they don’t look like lawmakers, they just look like political stooges. When was
the last time a bye-law in any of the 774 local government areas in Nigeria was
worth reporting by any newspaper? Absolutely none! All the laws affecting us
are being made at the centre, that is, the National Assembly. This is not
supposed to be so. Community issues like herdsmen crisis are supposed to be
managed internally by the people of those communities because the man in Abuja
might not really understand what’s happening in the communities. So we need to
strengthen the peripheries and devolve power from the centre and then this
laziness will go away. When this happens, the Federal Government can then focus
on the bigger issues. Right now, Nigeria should be focussing on Africa, not
Nigeria. The reason Boko Haram became a big issue is because Nigeria forgot to
handle Niger, Sudan, Cameroon and Mali. Those countries are supposed to relate
with Nigeria the way Canada, Mexico and Cuba relate with the US. But we have
become so small in our thinking. Our democracy should be worked on for us to
become better.
You
run a 13,000-hectare farm. How do you handle security challenges, particularly
the herdsmen issue?
We’ve had
two cases of kidnap on our farm. Our farm manager was kidnapped in 2015, we
paid a ransom to get him out. Also last year, a supervisor was kidnapped few
weeks to his wedding. We paid a ransom to get him out. These are some of the
issues we’re dealing with. But we have invested so much in security. We have
armed mobile policemen and we have other policemen guarding the place 24/7. We
have armed members of the O’odua Peoples Congress in the farm and we have local
vigilantes helping us. But, this has escalated the cost of doing business. To
be fair, the Kogi State government did a good job in terms of security and the
spate of kidnapping around us has greatly reduced. A lot of the hoodlums have
been arrested. The military has also been doing a good job. There was a time
about 310 soldiers were in the bush for two days combing for those criminals
and they made some arrests. So Kogi State has really responded to the spate of insecurity
around the environment. But again, it is not enough yet. Insecurity anywhere is
a threat to security everywhere. If Kogi State is responding well, the same
hoodlums would move to any other state like Benue or Ondo or Kwara. So we need
a coordinated effort which has to be locally-driven and federally-supported. If
there is no coordination and it’s just Ekiti State passing an anti-grazing law,
we will have disjointed solutions to the problem.
Do you
have a monthly budget for security on your farm?
Yes, but
I cannot disclose the actual figure as it is confidential information. What I
can say is that the costs were unexpected as I never thought we’d be spending a
really really significant money on security.
How do
you practically address the herdsmen issue?
Let’s
first do a reality check. A Fulani man’s cultural way of life was threatened.
He didn’t wake up one day and decide to become a hooligan and start killing
people. He’s only responding to an existential threat to his way of life that
has spanned hundreds of years. The Fulani men or nomads don’t see any boundary
on the land. They have absolutely no regard for national boundary. They just
have routes from Mali all the way to the South and then as the season changes,
they start going upwards again all the way to the North. Those routes were
handed over to them by their ancestors several generations back. Having said
that, at Independence, Nigeria’s population was around 40 million, but today,
we’re about 200 million, so the same land the Fulanis used to graze their
cattle had shrunk as people cultivated more and more land. So the area the
Fulani man grazed last year, he’s passing through the same place which has now
become a farm. Similarly, the demand for the Fulani man’s cow has also
increased. His ancestors were passing with 50 cows, now he’s passing with 300
cows, on smaller grazing field. This is to tell us the origin of the conflict
we’re having today so that we will not totally blame the Fulani man for who or
what he is today culturally. What we can say is that the government has failed
to respond adequately in a focused, deliberate and systematic manner to this
issue over the years. These are issues anyone should have seen coming. A lot of
papers had been written about this years ago, including by the current Minister
of Agriculture [Chief Audu Ogbeh]. Everywhere in the world where they breed
cows, they used to have nomads too, sometimes called cowboys, and they used to
allow open grazing, but when they saw the future, they responded adequately and
now they have what are called ranches. Now, in Nigeria, you can’t just wake up
and say you want to relocate people and call their homes grazing fields. The
time for putting in place any systematic mechanism to address the crisis is
past. Unfortunately, some of the interventions needed now have to be military.
Also, the farmers need to know the fact that a cow eats their yam doesn’t mean
they should kill it. That cow needs to eat quite a lot of yam for its exchange
value to be okay. When the farmer responds with anger and kills it, you can be
sure the Fulani man will retaliate. In my experience, when you approach a
Fulani man that his cow has eaten your cassava or yam and it is valued at so-so
amount, he will negotiate with you and pay. I have done this several times and
it works. They are always ready to pay you for your damage if you don’t kill
their cows. I have had this encounter before. We have had cases whereby we
arrested the cows and the herdsmen came to bail them. They don’t like their
cows to be arrested or killed, so they are always willing and happy to have a
conversation with you. Imagine a cow worth around N150,000 being killed by a
farmer because it ate yam or cassava leaves, the Fulani man will come with
weapons and retaliate. However, somebody has to moderate conversations like
this at the community level. Local court systems must be established where
complaints by farmers or herdsmen can go to and are evaluated. There should
also be presence of many policemen in communities. Nigeria is currently
under-policed and the ones we have are so many in cities that the villages and
communities have been neglected. This strategy has to change. If these measures
are put in place, there will be no room for conflict. Then we can look at
systematic solutions like grazing lands and establishment of markets. Note that
the Fulani man is grazing not just to feed his cow but to access markets. His
cow commands more value in the South than in the North. Yes, there are cities
in the North like Kano, but it is not the Fulani man that is gaining, it is the
merchant there who buys many cows and brings them to Lagos. If we are able to
get them access to markets without them moving their cows down to the South,
they will stay over there without destroying people’s farms. I have a friend
who goes to communities in the North to get milk from cows. Because he has
created an access to market for the women, they want to stay over there and
their herdsman husbands have also been forced to stay. Imagine how good it
would be having a coordinated effort by the government to maximise milk
production in the country by providing markets for the cow milk. However, we
can’t do much in terms of milk production because the cows move around so much
that their capacity to produce enough milk is diminished. Second, the Fulanis
are largely dispersed all over the country, so to aggregate milk in large
quantity is difficult if not impossible.
What
policies should the government be putting in place to make agriculture
attractive, especially to the youths?
Agriculture
is attractive enough as it is for young people; agricultural loans are the
cheapest you can find. On my farm, there are young people there, agronomists
and other young professionals. The young supervisor I told you was kidnapped
few weeks to his wedding, he spent a week with the kidnappers. We got him out
on a Friday and took him to the hospital. He didn’t sleep in the hospital but
came to work the following day because the field is awesome. When you see lush
green vegetation, when you see tractors working, when you see them discussing
research findings, they are excited. You need to hear them debate. Some of the
things they are discovering are contrary to what they learnt in school. To be
able to farm like that, it requires a lot of capital, however, the only way to
farm like that is when you understand the business of agriculture, which they
don’t teach at school. For example, the poor farmer in a Benue village looks
for buyers only after harvest while forty per cent of harvest is already lost
on the farm. What I think ought to happen will not be driven by young people
going into agriculture. It will be about young people partnering with big
businesses to create agricultural projects.
You may
have the passion, have the love, but you may not have access to large land and
machinery. You need to team up with businesses so that you will not become a
farmer, but an agricultural businessman or entrepreneur. This is where the
government can come in if it wants to help the youths. The government can
create business education for them which is facilitated by businesses that can
fund those projects like what is done abroad. Government should work with
companies and campuses to create this kind of business education. For example,
that’s what the Ministry of Labour and Productivity or that of Youth and
Sports, should be doing. The government should do activations on campuses to
not only make young people have interest in agriculture, but to also become
agricultural businessmen. Once a young person can see money, he doesn’t mind
the sweat.
What
technologies do you think will shape the future of agriculture in Nigeria?
We are
doing catch-up and I don’t think innovation will disrupt agriculture here
anytime soon. Ninety-five per cent of our agriculture is still subsistence.
Actually, Nigeria is one of the few places in the world where hoes and
cutlasses are still being used. This is not happening even in Kenya or Uganda
or Malawi. It is only in Nigeria we still sweep our homes with brooms. There
needs to be a break-away from what used to be. We should quickly make use of
the available technology and not think about innovation for now. The use of
tractors is still at the basic level and how fish farming is done here is still
rudimentary. So let’s make more use of the existing technology.
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