The Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of the Nigerian Incentive-Based Risk Sharing System for Agricultural Lending (NIRSAL), Mr Aliyu Abduhameed has advised participants at the Guild of Editor’s Conference to have an alternative economic livelihood.
He gave the advice while delivering a lecture on the topic; “Accessing Capital for Alternative Career Development for Editors,” at the NAF Centre in Abuja.
The NIRSAL Managing Director equally stated that opportunities abound in the Agricultural sector for everyone as the business has various stages which include production, storage, middle men, as well as suppliers.
He further pointed out that the riskiest investment usually has the highest yield.
Abduhameed said the Guild of Editors is an elite group of the society who are educated and that makes it easy to train them, bank them and risk manage them.
INSECURITY AND AGRICULTURE
On the issue of security affecting agricultural production, he said, “Though the insecurity situation in the country affects food production, cooperation is needed from all segments of the society as the government deploys both kinetic and non-kinetic power to curb the situation.
“It takes a whole lot of cooperation from different segments of society, to solve the security issue. The government is doing its best, both Kinetically and non-kinetically to resolve the issue, that does not mean that wherever it is secured which is a larger percentage of Nigerian farming area, we cannot produce optimally. If, for example, on a100% basis, you have security issues in 1%, what stops us from optimizing production in about 90 to 97 percent of the spaces, which is really the key.
“When you blew the insecurity issue out of proportion. It will appear to outside as if the whole country is engulfed. But the thing is not true. They are area-specific areas within security. We agree. We know, we try to avoid involvement in those areas but a larger swath of the Nigerian family landscape is available for production and it doesn’t have to be field crops alone comes alone. You can do poultry, you can do fishery, you can do field agriculture. You can do urban agriculture.
“So for today, it is the Nigerian Guild of Editors. What you will hope for is that lets establish, a pilot project that works and like I said, this pilot projects were going to do jointly with the Nigerian Guild of Editors is going to be an example to other professional bodies and to the larger society,” said the NIRSAL CEO.
The two-day conference with the theme: “Media in Times of Crisis: Resolving Conflict, Achieving Consensus,” ended in Abuja with a dinner and the induction of new members into the Nigerian Guild of Editors among which were Funke Egbemode, Abdullahi Magaji, Tony Iyare, amongst others.
PIAK
