In Part I of this inspiring interview, Rotimi Williams discussed Kereksuk Rice Farm. In Part II, he discusses Resolute 4.0 and the agricultural landscape in Nigeria.
Flora IP (FI): The perennial *farmer-herder conflicts across Nigeria threatens food production, lives and livelihoods. Resolute 4.0 introduces innovative technology solutions to tackle the conflicts. Please tell us more about Resolute 4.0?
Rotimi Williams (RW): Resolute 4.0 was created about two years ago (it will be two years in September 2020). Right from when I started planting in Nasarawa State, I had to deal with working with the Fulani and communal conflicts. It became apparent that more had to be done because the sheer number of people that were being killed was not making any sense. I started to think of how we could come up with schemes to help. That is how Resolute 4.0 came about. We thought about how to use technology to reduce the conflicts.
It takes a long time to kill 50 people. It is not done in one minute. In that period, was a call made to the police or any security agency? If a call was made, why was there no response?
What we wanted to create was a system to bridge the communication gap between those communities and security agencies. We are sitting as the third eye – watching and making sure that there is communication and attendant action. Our system provides proof and generates data. In Bassa Local Government, Plateau State, where we have been operating for a year now, we know every attack that has occurred. We pass the information to the military to intervene. We know the time, location, frequency, and mode of attacks. By plotting that, we can determine the correlation and conflict trend analysis. It has proven very successful. There have been no killings in the last two months. We have effectively consulted the data to position military personnel where most issues have occurred. What we now notice is a change in tactic by the attackers because they have noticed that military personnel appear in the places where they attack. Resolute 4.0 is fully operational in Bassa Local Government, Plateau State. We now want to expand.
By the way, our intervention in Bassa Local Government was supposed to be a pilot. We wanted to assess how easily the community would be able to use the application. Within a week of deployment, we were forced to go live, because there were killings the following week, and it did not stop. On the healthcare front, which is how the primary healthcare ambit of Resolute 4.0 evolved, we noticed that we were the first to receive information whenever a shooting or an incident occurs in the community. We received detailed information about the status of the victim. Upon receipt of the information, we would call the hospital (which is about an hour away) and provide all the necessary information about the patient – age, type of gunshot wound, location of the wound, amongst others, to help them prepare for treatment. Next, we would call the doctor – it takes the doctor about 15 minutes to get to the hospital, takes her/him another 15 minutes to set up. With our notification, the doctor is in the hospital, ready and waiting for the patient to arrive.
The preparation time often saves the lives of the patients.
We have intervened in a few cases, and we are looking to see how to expand this so that all the hospitals and primary health care facilities in the local area receive notifications of incoming patients with a gunshot or machete wounds from communal conflicts.
FI: How do members of the communities get involved in the Resolute 4.0 system?
RW: It is purely targeted. I created Resolute 4.0 to deal with issues in Nasarawa State and the neighbouring Taraba and Benue States. Every time there is an attack in Benue or Taraba State, most of the cattle that can no longer graze there move to Tunga, Nasarawa State, which is where I farm and disrupt my operations. The time to deploy coincided with the alleged killing of 300 cattle in Bassa Local Government. We knew immediately that there was probably going to be a reprisal from the community. The question was – how do we at Resolute 4.0 ameliorate the adverse effects of the reprisal or prevent the reprisal? This engendered our deployment in Bassa Local Government. We work with the Plateau State peacebuilding agency to identify key security-minded individuals in the community. We gave these individuals phones with our installed app and trained them on how to use it.
Many other members of the community have tried to come on board Resolute 4.0, but we discourage this because we do not want false alarms. It is easier for us to keep our operation lean for now.
FI: What are the effects of the COVID-19 on food security in Nigeria?
RW: High prices. I do not think that we felt the full effects yet. Most of the herbicides I used this year was purchased last year. The price adjustments have not been fully implemented to respond to the higher dollar prices. We are going to see that in the coming year, and that may affect fertiliser, herbicide, and pesticide prices (subject to government subsidisation, which I hope will continue, if not farmers will be in trouble). Access to farmers with particular skills required was initially difficult because of lockdown measures, but this is getting better now.
The scariest scenario for me will be a situation where food is available, but people cannot afford it. We do not have a social system in Nigeria, so how do we handle this?
That seems to be where we are headed to now because a lot of people are losing their jobs. A lot of people are just not earning what they did in the past – their disposal income is reducing, and the price of food is increasing.
FI: Nigeria is projected to be the third most populous country in the world by 2050. What is your perspective about its current food and agricultural landscape? What changes would you like to see?
RW: Our food and agriculture policies are often designed by people that are not on the field and who do not necessarily understand the key issues. If you assess a lot of the programs today, they are mostly created in isolation, without fully understanding what the farmer needs. Land clearing and input costs are still expensive. The government’s fertiliser programme is mired in corruption. The fertiliser that should be distributed to farmers is sold in the open market, by those who have been assigned to distribute them. All those loopholes need to be addressed if we are going to progress.
A lot more importance has to be placed on rural development. A lot of people in rural areas are trying to make a bit of money to move to the urban area. 80 per cent of our food is produced in the rural area and the people who produce them want to move to the urban areas. How do you make the rural area more conducive and attractive for the people there? I think that is going to be the challenge in the medium to long term.
Everybody who has worked on my farm dreams of moving to Lagos, Jos or Abuja. We from the cities are moving to the rural areas to try to produce. This is one of the challenges we will have.
Heavy reliance on importation is another crucial issue, but you cannot fix that without local production. Local production needs to be optimal. Nigeria needs a willing government that understands what agriculture means, what value chains require, and how to break down the components of the value chains from crop to crop. Right now, the government is lumping the entire value chain. For example, the value chain for rice is not the same for maize. The government needs to determine what the different parts of the country have comparative advantages to produce and empower farmers to produce them. For example, the government could create 5 to 7 rice-growing areas and same for other crops. I believe the maize growing areas should be in the North because diets in the North involve a lot of maize. Culture and tradition have broken down our diets according to what is available where we are. The government could also use that as a guide to design appropriate agricultural projects in the country.
FI: Nigeria has 70 to 80 per cent small scale farmers who currently produce most of the food consumed. Can small scale farming sustainably feed Nigeria? What are your thoughts about the government’s agricultural promotion projects?
RW: Subsistence farming cannot feed Nigeria in the future. It has done that in the past. But to increase production, we need large corporations that can take the risk to develop more land and increase yield per hectare. The government’s programs have made it easier for some subsistence farmers to get access to inputs, which will improve their productivity. These small scale farmers can gradually transition from subsistence farming to medium-size farms. The government would also need to provide training on management and assist with facilitating access to market.
The government’s push to agriculture is not organic. It is a desperate attempt to create employment. What the government should do is to make agriculture attractive to both the people in the rural and urban areas. This would establish a system where people in rural areas produce the raw materials and the people in the urban areas process them. The people in urban areas can then go back to scale production. What we see now is the government throwing money at subsistent farmers to produce more. But they do not necessarily have the skill to scale. I have seen it on my farm. For example, I use four bags of fertiliser per hectare, and the average farmer in the community uses half a bag. When I give them four bags to spread on the farm, they do not know what to do. These are the types of issues that the government’s push presents, but the government does not see these. You are faced with different challenges when you scale. A lot of the farmers I employ on my farm are grateful for the opportunity to make mistakes and learn on a big farm because they do not have that experience.
*See Rotimi’s recent essay on Medium, titled, ‘A Short Whitepaper on understanding the dynamics of communal conflicts in Nigeria and the effect of the Blanket labelling as “Farmer -Herder crisis.”
