Enugu State Governor Peter Mbah has said the investment drive of his administration over the past 9 months in office had started to lift poor citizens out of the pit of poverty through government’s deliberate efforts and determination.
The governor disclosed this while receiving the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD)’s associate vice president (AVP), Dr. Donal Brown, and members of his team who were on a working and inspection visit to the state in Enugu on Wednesday.
This was even as Brown lauded the governor for his vision of sustaining the IFAD programme, saying the key success to the project is sustainability.
Mbah, who expressed appreciation to the United Nations’ specialized agency for the assistance and intervention the state had been receiving in the area of agriculture, said his administration was determined to ensure that agriculture is seen as a low hanging fruit for the people of the state and one of the easy routes of escaping poverty.
He said the programme of IFAD was of immense benefit to the people because of its objectives which target rural and smallholder farmers who are the main producers of the daily food being consumed in the country.
“Just as I have noted earlier, on the desk where we are, we may forget the link and the role the smallholder farmers and rural farmers play in the economy. But if you do all the high-level policy formulations and the rural farmers are not accommodated, you will always miss the link.
It is the aggregation of rural farmer holdings that come up to your GDP, and when you measure them back in the lives of our people, you will see that it is huge,” the governor said.
He stressed that through the right support and intervention, rural farmers and smallholder farmers are now able to meet their financial needs such as the payment of school fees for their children, access to maternal healthcare and savings.
“We look forward to a more robust relationship with you because experiences have also shown that we must work towards improving what you have done. And I know that your resource is not elastic, that at some point you’re going to stop the programme, and we must sustain it to ensure seamless continuity and even improve on what you’re leaving behind. So, we want to develop a homegrown relationship with you that enables investment you have made to become self-sustaining so that whenever you’re in Africa or Nigeria, you can stop by or can look back at your legacy,” Mbah said.
The governor, who was represented by the deputy governor, Barr Ifeanyi Ossai, while lamenting the perennial post-harvest losses farmers have been facing in the state, urged IFAD for more support to enable the creation of aggregation centres around farm clusters for production preservation that would minimize post-harvest challenges.
Earlier, Brown said he was in Enugu to deepen their conversation with the state government on the way both bodies could strengthen their interests, and to also inspect some of the projects funded by IFAD in the last couple of years.
“We have come to Enugu State to look at some of the work we’ve funded through the government of Nigeria. And we selected Enugu State because we have very good things about the work that is happening here,” he stressed.
