By Yemi Olakitan
President Muhammadu Buhari has said that irrigation projects across the nation are receiving priority attention from his administration due to their significant economic contributions as well as support from stakeholders in the benefited communities.
The President made the disclosure on Tuesday at Auyo in Auyo Local Council of Jigawa State while commissioning the N17 billion Hadejia Valley Irrigation Scheme, which covers a net area of 5,780 hectares.
The Federal Ministry of Water Resources carried out the plan as part of the Transforming Irrigation Management in Nigeria (TRIMING) Project with assistance from the World Bank.
The President recalled that in 2018, he accepted the Minister of Water Resources’ invitation to personally launch the HVIS project as a sign of his administration’s commitment to self-sufficiency in food production, job creation, and ultimately poverty reduction.
He reaffirmed the administration’s commitment to working to increase irrigated agriculture’s appeal to the nation’s teeming youth population.
In order to ensure Nigeria’s food security, he said, “This is to provide opportunity for year-round farming and enormous employment generation.
“We are therefore convinced that increasing food production, including through dry season farming, is the key to our quest for economic diversification and survival. More jobs and wealth will be produced by irrigated agriculture that is sound and sustainable. Because we will produce as much as we consume as a country and export any excess, it will usher in long-term economic prosperity. The fact that irrigated agriculture will offer year-round socioeconomic and food production activities, thereby facilitating sustainable economic prosperity, is one of the reasons we will continue to support this option.”
Minister of Water Resources, Suleiman Adamu, described the TRIMING Project as an innovative model approach adopted by the Federal Government with the goal of providing farming communities involved with the Project with access to opportunities that could change their lives.
He said the project was also acting as a means of efficiently utilising the large water resource infrastructure, some of which had been constructed more than 40 years prior but had largely gone untapped or been grossly underutilised.
He said: “The pressure on policy makers and practitioners in the food production industry has continued to mount as a result of the increasing concerns about food security around the world brought on by demographic pressure, increased competition for water, and climate variability.
“These developments have highlighted irrigation’s critical role in addressing the world’s growing food and fibre shortage, particularly for the rapidly expanding urban population in emerging and least developed nations. Existing irrigation and drainage systems must be upgraded, modernised, added to, or otherwise improved upon to meet this goal, and in some cases, completely redesigned.”
The minister named farmers, villagers, irrigation and drainage organisations, water user associations, basin stakeholders, and other stakeholders as the primary beneficiaries of all TRIMING Project components.
In his words, “About 140,000 farm families with about one million people will directly benefit from the direct infrastructure investments (covering about 37,000 ha) and concomitant activities in agriculture and on-farm water management focused in these areas.”
Additionally, it is anticipated that the project will strengthen five Water User Association Federations (WUAF), each of which includes about 550 multiple secondary and tertiary level Water Users Associations (WUAs) that serve and represent the project’s beneficiary farmers.
Also, some activities are aimed at enhancing upstream and downstream communication and strengthening integrated water resources management across states.
According to Adamu, the President’s commissioning of the HVIS is a clear indication of the Federal Ministry of Water Resources’ commitment to supporting his efforts to effectively harness the nation’s abundant natural, human, and particularly water resources. The President wants to transform Nigeria into a strong and virile economy.
The Water Users Association (WUA) had been trained by the World Bank-funded Transforming Irrigation Management in Nigeria (TRIMING), according to Adamu, to run and maintain the facilities.
The Hadejia Valley Irrigation Scheme (HVIS), according to Peter Yakubu Manjok, the TRIMING Project’s national project coordinator, took the contractors about four and a half years to complete.