African Development Bank, AfDB has said it is committed along with other funding development partners to ensure the Special Agro-Industrial Zones, SAPZ, programme does not fail like other previous agricultural programmes. Speaking during a media briefing on the sidelines of the just concluded two-day ‘Special Agro-Industrial Processing Zones, SAPZ, States Steering and Technical Committee Workshop and Validation of the SAPZ Programme Operational Guidelines’ in Abuja, the Senior Special Advisor to the President of the AfDB on Industrialisation, Prof Banji Oyelaran-Oyeyinka, expressed optimism that with the indoor meeting held with the seven participating States and the Federal Capital Territory, FCT, the programme will be accelerated. According to Oyelaran-Oyeyinka, the SAPZ Programme is the best way to industrialise and diversify the Nigerian economy based on its implementation in South Korea, China, Vietnam, and other countries.
He said with the vast arable land Nigeria stands to be placed on the fast-lane of food production, affordable food and availability, and these will attract massive flow of investments into the economy, and people would rather migrate from the urban to rural, which he described SAPZ as perry-urban areas. He said “I believe that after the discussions yesterday and today that was why we organised this meeting and we called it ‘Accelerated Implementation Agenda’ of this SAPZ because we don’t want it to go down like any other of this programmes in Nigeria. So, I believe we have a better understanding of how and what we all need to do, and we have set a hard deadline of December 20, 2024, if anyone is not willing to obey the rules, they should just say it and then we cancel them. We believe because there is something that lies in our hands, and those that lie in our hands, we will not allow it to fail. We believe that if we score 80 per cent, we have succeeded. Out of the eight States, three of them are funded by IsDB. Five of them are in our (AfDB) hands.
“I have seen that at least three or four of them are playing by the rules, trying very hard to play by the rules. If all we get is four out of five, that is 80 per cent. For me, that would be a success at the end of the year. We also believe because we are resilient. If it hasn’t been resilience, we would have given up a long time ago. We cannot begin to recount to you all the things we found along the way. As I said, if not for our patriotism and determination, we cannot because we are fighting, it’s different. It’s about people having enough to eat.” Meanwhile, according to him, the AfDB in the second phase of the programme would focus basically on the private sector as it is found in Ethiopia, “We are also supporting that. So what we are doing now in phase two is actually building around the private sector.” The National Programme Coordinator, SAPZ, Dr Kabir Yusuf, said, “We have said by December you will see us signing contracts with DBO contractors. I have charged all my staff and they have gone to all the states to get what we call the client’s requirements; these are the measurements, the site locations, activities needs, power locations for bidders to be able to bid and out cost to it. “We have also had several meetings with the Director General, African Development Bank, AfDB, Nigeria Country Department, Abdul Kamara, just to see how best can we follow the rules but shorten that period and get the signing that contract by December, once e do that by January we are going to mobilise them and most of them will have 12 or so months for us to see a well built process zones.”
Meanwhile, the participating State Governments have assured that they will hit the ground running because of their full understanding and how to address the challenges that slowed down the programme.
