The Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, on Tuesday said the President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration has created new set of millionaires through Agriculture.
Mohammed, who made the assertion while featuring on Channels Television Programme, claimed that the feat was achieved through policies.
According to Mohammed, “What this government has done is that in the area of agriculture, we have created a new set of millionaires in Kebbi, Imo, Jigawa, Kano states so much that today, these new farmers have been empowered and we have made agriculture quite attractive to them”.
Commenting on prices of food items, he said, “In any country where you lack basic infrastructure like roads, railways, power, you are going to have a situation where the cost of food would go up and that is why we are investing in infrastructural development.
“On rail line, we have commenced the construction of the 150km per hour Lagos-Ibadan rail. We have been able to put down our $1.2bn counterpart funding that would make us do also Kano-Kaduna-Calabar and Port Harcourt line.
“By the time these things are put in place, traders would be able to bring tomatoes by train from Kano to Lagos would be able to bring food from the middle belt and that is what is going to make your food cheap. As we speak today, what government is trying to do is how do we subsidize transportation of these food items to bring them down. So if you don’t have power, roads, railways in any part of the world, the cost of food would go up”.
He maintained that the Buhari-led government has been able to move the economy out of recession in the area of agricultural, Manufacturing and Solid Mineral sectors.
Mohammed said, “Despite these austere times, we actually did move out of recession in manufacturing, agriculture and solid minerals”
He explained that Nigeria has been able to move out of recession in the manufacturing sector because of government’s commitment to “invest in infrastructure, to improve the ease of doing business and unlike the previous administration where 16% was spent on infrastructure in 2015, we spent 30% in 2017 and that is why you can see that we are climbing out of recession.”
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