Soludo’s Palm Revolution: Understanding Why It Has To Be Micro If Not Nano

MAZI EJIMOFOR OPARA 

Ending endemic poverty requires strategic empowerment rooted in sincere empathy for the poor and vulnerable. It must be devoid of technicalities, yet it should be sophisticated enough to ensure sustainability. This is what Gov. Soludo is doing with the Palm revolution, targeted at households across the state. Particularly, rural communities.

I have read in some quarters where informed arguments have been advanced about the viability of situating the laudable Agricultural initiative at the household and individual levels against the Okpara model of mapping out plantations fully controlled by government. My simple response will be to draw an analogy with the days of NITEL “phone booths” located at particular points and managed by NITEL, and the democratization of the same service by GSM service providers that increased the spread of same service through empowering individuals to become the gatekeepers for public telephone services.

While we know that NITEL phone booths served its purpose at the time, the need to increase nano, small and micro enterprises is far more economically feasible than increasing government wage bills and expanding bureaucracies. Government must continue to experiment with new policies that will improve individual enterprise, attack poverty at its very roots and create sustainable wealth and prosperity for the people. This was well achieved when we moved away from NITEL public phone booths to individual controlled public phone services.

This is the model that has proven most effective in recent time. Let me draw up another example with the financial sector. It has become trite to state that with the introduction of the POS services, more players have come onboard the financial systems, creating millions of Nano and micro enterprises employing millions of people. Yet, the financial services sector has become even more effective in delivering quality and timely services to the Nigerian market.

In another decade and more, Soludo would have created an ecosystem of mass Farmers servicing the agricultural value chain in many ways than our minds can currently conceive.