It is counterintuitive: a nation where everyone is an employer is poor, and a place where everyone is a farmer has more hungry people. So, do not celebrate that more than 30% of Nigeria’s working population work in agriculture: “Nigeria’s agriculture sector continues to be the largest employer in 2023, engaging over 25 million individuals in farming, forestry, and fishing activities. According to the latest report by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), agriculture remains the backbone of the Nigerian workforce, accounting for 30.1% of the country’s total employment.”
The NBS data indicates that 25,341,219 individuals are actively employed in the agriculture sector, which surpasses the wholesale and retail trade sector, Nigeria’s second-largest employer. The trade sector employs 23,133,193 people, representing 27.5% of the workforce.
This latest figure underlines the importance of agriculture in filling Nigeria’s unemployment gap, especially in rural communities where access to other employment opportunities remains limited.
It is time for Nigeria to industrialize, and move away from where everyone is doing the same thing, and scaling poverty and hunger in the land of farmers. In America, just 2% of the working population do the farming and they can feed themselves and also export big time. We must clone whatever they’re doing.
Nigeria’s weakest link remains electricity as farmers cannot really invest more without energy to avoid post harvest wastages which could hit up to 37% in some places.
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