Monarch prides Abraka as best producers of garri in Nigeria

By Debra Akudo

The monarch of Umraghwa Oria Abraka kingdom, (Rtd) has told members of the Community Newspaper publishers that, Abraka his kingdom produces the best garri in the country.

He made this revelation recently when the publishers paid him a courtesy visit to know more about the cassava mechanized farming going on in Abraka. The monarch pride that Abraka is a semi urban and semi-rural community mainly into agriculture and mainly into cassava farming. “The quality of garri in Nigeria is measured by the Abraka garri standard, it is the best in the country and we are proud of it”

Ovie of Abraka kingdom, HRM AVM Lucky Ochuko Ararile

we have been eating it for centuries and after ascending the throne I realized that we needed some form of productive activity that will engage the youths, because unemployment is fundamental to the meeting youth restiveness if you don’t provide job an don’t get the youths engaged there is nothing you can do, they will be restive, sometimes I put myself in their shoes thinking if at thirty for example I wasn’t employed and I had a degree what would I have  become because in trying to solve a problem you must first of all put yourself in the person’s shoes, so when I thought about that I said what can I do, I don’t have that kind of money to set up industries here so I attracted the attention of the Federal Ministry of Agriculture to the fact that we have vast arable land in Umiaghwa that can be used for cassava cultivation and it was a partnership between the community, the federal ministry of Agriculture  and the Delta State government,  somehow the fed government got disinterested probably because at the time the agreement was made it was during the time of  Jonathan’s administration when APC came into power we tried to reengage with the new government, I went to Abuja saw the minister for Agriculture, chief Audu Ogbeh and we agreed that the project should continue, as part of the agreement the federal agreement outsourced the implementation part of the project to a private company, a concessionaire  and the idea was to get sufficient cassava to run a cassava  mill , the plan was for a 240 metric tons per day cassava processing mill now part of the problem we ran into, after starting when we planted the first 400 hectares.

So we have that project there which is what relatively has brought some measure of peace because the youth are engaged and majorly the women are engaged, my strategy actually is to engage the women more because if the women are employed and they can provide food in the home there will be food for the family, you know if you empower the men first they may end up marrying more wives and keep the wives hungry, so my concentration is actually on the women. On a daily basis we are harvesting, there is a company, Ereghwa Farms who is the actual owner of the farms, they are the ones doing the planting, it is because of the problem concerning the land.

Specking further, he said the original plan was to plant 2000 hectares directly by the company then an additional 1000 hectares out growers scheme, the company will assist farmers based on their capacity they will provide seedlings, fertilizers and clearing the farmers are just to maintain and when it is harvest time, they will harvest and sell to the company at an agreed market price but all those things are now in abeyance, they  can’t bring in the plant because we have not been able to guarantee them the land to plant 2000 hectares, so far they have done about 450 hectares which they are harvesting now, and because the plant is not available they are not actually making profit because they have to harvest the cassava and take the cassava to Lagos where there are plants that mill the cassava and each of the 30 tons trailer is about 150,000 naira per trip to  Lagos so if the plant was here you can imagine the savings per transportation cost so that is a major problem the sooner we sort out this land encroachment issue the better it will be,  with the guarantee of the plant within nine months being operational in this kingdom .

Specking on the herdsmen killing, “We have also been able to manage the Herdsmen Crisis in this kingdom”