AFRICA STAYS RICH

The 2022 Africa Day celebration theme is the importance of addressing malnutrition and food insecurity. The concept is to first celebrate the coming together of African nations to form a group, give accolades to the heroes past for laying a solid foundation, and present heroes for carrying on the legacy.

We have come a long way and it is time to start telling our story. We have been labeled differently over centuries, but what stands true every time is that we are and will always be RICH — in substance, quality, resources, strength, and intellect.

On Wednesday, 25th May 2022, Jayeola Okunazun — the General Manager of the Ventures Park was in a conversation with Yop Rwang Pam on IG live, and the focus was on Africa Stays Rich. Yop started by defining “rich” as the intangible qualities of African worldwide. We are involved in the building of continents and nations like the European continent, the USA, and so on. We are better represented not in the clothes, styles, or hair, but by the mental capacity and intellectual prowess of Africans both at home and abroad.

We are rich in population and it’s time we started seeing that we have leverage. We are not oblivious to our challenges but we must also take time to take account of the things we have and hope for the future we want o build.

The conversation moved from the things we have to its management and leadership. The major highlight of this section was corruption. Jayeola quoted John C. Maxwell ``everything rises and falls on the leadership” and went on to ask what could be done to resolve the issue of corruption and leadership. Yop said, “Nobody has the answers”.

She pointed out that eradicating corruption is a tough order because it has a lot of human factors in it and we should start accepting that. The countries that are corruption-free out of the countries we have in the world can be counted. We have to accept that we have corruption, then take away what empowers it, and create a legal pattern of operation.

She asked a really important question, “If we bring a good person into a rotten system, how much do we expect to achieve?”. If we have created systems that will work, then right now, it won’t be too hard to have better leaders to put things back to order. People will sabotage good leadership and that is frustrating in itself. Fighting corruption should not be one person’s work, it should be the collective work of all institutions working with a governing system. Leadership then supports these institutions to keep doing the work.

Jayeola reiterated that the issue of corruption is systemic, not an individual fight. It has thrived because there is a demand and supply side, which empowered people to sponsor it. For it to be solved, it has to be addressed from the system’s roots before it impacts individuals.

Furthermore, the conversation moved to Africa’s population growth and food security. Statistics show that by 2050, Nigeria for example will have grown to a population of 400 million people. Can it be used to our advantage? Do we have the leadership to help with that? Those are questions that should be answered with certainty.

However, we need to do our research. We need people who can go into specific places to find the issues and proffer solutions to those problems. What is the scale of our labor force, and what is our expertise? How can we channel that and in what sectors should we grow capacities? What is causing this growth and how can it be managed? What social structure can we put in place? These and many more questions must be answered to have a sense of direction. Yop noted that we need better answers not for others but for ourselves. Can we tackle these problems, and leverage our population to fix them? She believes we can but will we? This circles back to Leadership, she said.

Jayeola went on to ask as regards food insecurity and malnutrition. What specific technical advice can be done about it? Yop responded that“I want to see research and data from local researchers”. People who are going into the fields and answering the recession level, agricultural investment, and future ROI, very local cortex data, recommendations, and opportunities in improving our nutrition. We should have enough local data on these factors and their impact on our population. We need to localize and contextualize our data to make decisions on education, nutrition, population, and so on.

We depend so much on data from development partners, they are great and can support it, but should be able to use local data that can be broken down into an actionable plan. This is how things change and this is how it can be better. International researchers can use a sample of an area but might not cover the important details that are addressing our customized cases. We have them, and we can progress by investing well in them.

The conversation progressed toward what we should be doing right now in the processing and storage of food. The points stated were identifying the latest method of farming, the type of crop we should be planting, taking out the middleman, investing in the education of the farmer, and letting Farmers enjoy the profit.

Yop said “We love agriculture but we have not found a way to help her”.so she stated the 3 bullet points for Agriculture, food security, and improved nutrition:

• Truly build the capacity of the farmer
• Leverage the latest and best to make sure you have the best outputs
• Identify major high-nutrition food crops and find ways to focus on them, start with and push them.

In conclusion, one person can’t do it, but with a collective effort, Africa will stay rich.