By Odoh Diego Okenyodo
Recently, I started listening to Bongos Ikwue’s Idoma folk songs. A new paramount ruler of the Idoma, Och’Idoma, that I am likely to have an audience with very soon, has been coronated, and I need to improve my vocabs. That’s not exactly why, but I get intrigued by how much recent history and anthropology reside in the songs. In particular, I want to refer to Ahinya, a track in which the singer thanks Idoma, his fatherland, extolling its virtues and the opportunities in the land. Such opportunities are mainly in agriculture, as Benue is not known for large deposits of solid minerals (unless yam is considered a solid mineral).
Before I wrote this piece, I spent time on search engines hoping that someone had written a critical piece on the Bongos Ikwue song. That way, I would have someone else’s translation of what the song said in Idoma when it urged Idoma people to come home and till the soil to farm beniseed or sesame seed and soyabeans. But, even if my translation turns out to be inaccurate, you get an idea of the singer making a clarion call on young Idoma people to go back to the farms.
Long before AK47 became common features on farmlands, sowing crimson fear, farming had started losing its allure as a viable economic activity. This was due to a conspiracy of several factors that made losses for farmers. Farm inputs such as fertiliser were traded like Mafia commodities, and agricultural tools remained a little better than those used for the hunting and gathering stage in the development of mankind. Despite these, when farmers spent their energies to generate some produce, they wouldn’t have access to markets, owing to bad roads, and suitable storage facilities failed to appear as the government wished them to. And would be how oranges, bananas, tomatoes, yams, and potatoes perished prematurely and went to vegetable hell fire, never fulfilling their God-ordained potentials. Theirs never rest in peace. If only someone could have added some value by processing them.
This is how impact investment pops onto the stage to steal the show, hopefully carrying a pantry with pomp and pageantry. (Honestly, what did that alliteration mean? Sometimes, my head de spark with this poetry thing. Anyway…) Impact investment is that type of investment that aims to make profit while making a well-defined and measurable social impact. It’s like capitalism doing penance. You know, when you have made a lot of money and profit alone is no longer all you want, but you desire to solve some of the social problems you ignored (or caused) long ago on your riotous and muddy climb to the top.
Impact investment is relatively new in Nigeria, being championed by an NGO known as the Impact Investors Foundation (IIF). The late revolutionary development expert, Innocent Chukwuma, was the arrowhead of this initiative when, serving as the Ford Foundation’s West Africa Director, he pulled together a consortium of organisations to establish the IIF. Four years down the line, the concept is gaining traction as the middle ground between philanthropy and crass capitalism. If a person has got money and is not in the mood to shell that out to charity, while being bored stiff with fixed deposits and the type of betting called stock trading, impact investing is the way to go.
As the Projects Lead of the IIF, Ms Etemore Glover, sometimes says when I chat with her because she is a friend from the university days, impact investments in Nigeria focus on education, health and agriculture sectors. There may also be crosscutting themes such as gender and technology, and perhaps the environment, if my memory doesn’t need a hard reset. The presence of agriculture piqued my interest in this subject, and it might not be too difficult to see why.
In the past 13 or so years that Nigeria has been battling insurgencies, the attacks have had a pattern of being disproportionately heavy on agrarian communities or directly on farmers. I think no singular occupational group has come under attack by the bandits and insurgents as farmers. Of course, lately, religious leaders, consisting mainly of Catholic priests, could be the next most attacked occupational cluster. Even inter-state taxi drivers probably would rank 2nd or 3rd on the ladder. But even if statistics were to disprove my observations by showing that any of the two groups have suffered in the hands of kidnappers and insurgents more than farmers, you would agree that farming would have the most profound and debilitating effect on society.
The effect of the attacks on farmers is glaring in the worsening situation of food supply in Nigeria, and this is not a reason to lament in this column. It is just to explain why impact investing, applied to agriculture, could salvage the situation. Maybe I should start with an example of two organisations that received impact investment in the agriculture space. One is Babban Gona and other is Tomato Jos. Babban Gona’s strategy is to train farmers on the best methods and management, then provide credit and farm inputs at lower prices, and support the farmers with harvesting and marketing. As obvious as this appears, this handholding of the farmers throughout the process, from beginning to end, makes a big difference. That’s what $18m of impact investment can do. If I get that, I will brand my Benue Rice or package Benue Yam for you!
As for Tomato Jos, one is always tempted to think of Flavour Nabania’s voice when the name comes up, but that is far from what they do. They add value to tomatoes that would otherwise have gone to waste by proactively targeting to make pastes from the tomatoes grown by smallholder farmers who would otherwise have lost their crops. They estimated that Nigeria produces roughly two-thirds of the tomatoes in West Africa, but while not producing purees and other products of value addition, the availability of the commodity can be seasonal and lead to a glut when it is in season. Now, they have a plant worth $5m in Kaduna State, and they partner with 350 farmers. This is in the same Kaduna State that I haven’t embarked on a road journey to for 3 or 4 years!
If you study these cases closely, they can tell you a lot about what Nigeria stands to gain from impact investment, specifically targetting agriculture. Impact investment, when done right, has the potential to bring the financial discipline of the corporate financial world to bear on the benevolence of the social impact sector. In the social impact sector, represented by NGOs and other charity organisations (which should have included governments), the focus is on spending and not on value for money as such. In private capital, the focus is on cutting costs and maximising profits. Now we have a model that ought to take advantage of the best of both worlds.
Of course, as a new concept, there are challenges and grey areas. Who would guarantee what happens in the sector? There is a need for regulation and for government to stretch its hands into the space–financially too. Recently, the government joined in the launch of a Wholesale Impact Investment Fund (WIIF), with the intent of raising $100bn to support the kind of businesses I used as examples above. The Honourable Minister of State for Budget and National Planning, Prince Clem Agba, has even inaugurated a committee on this. He charged them “to unlock local private investments using capital from public sources and to delve into strategies for attracting investments from Development Finance Institutions (DIFS) into the impact investing ecosystem”. I love the refreshing sound of all these. I wish it weren’t in the wee hours of this administration’s life. I am keeping hope alive that, given the private sector involvement and the drive by an NGO, something positive shall come out of this, and Nigeria shall be rescued from this edge of looming starvation.