The Kwara State government has engaged 150 farmers in a five-day capacity training towards improved economic targets and food sufficiency.
The farmers, who comprised of 30 each from the five Special Agric-Industrial Processing Zone (SAPZ’s) catchment areas: Ifelodun, Asa, Kaiama, Baruten and Mooro local governments, were engaged in “high-yield seed, crop protection, products and fertilisers” under the state’s SAPZ project.
Speaking during the training programme in Ilorin, Governor Abdulrahman Abdulrazaq, represented by the commissioner for finance, Dr. Hauwa Nuru, said that the training was part of the governor’s vision to improve the economy and sustain job creation.
Governor Abdulrazaq, who said that “government cannot do it all alone”, added that there must be collaborations with financial institutions and other relevant agencies, “to use agriculture to generate more money and more jobs and improve living standards in Kwara State”.
He also said that the benefits from it would only materialise when the trainees optimise the importance of the use of seeds, which is guaranteed by the economic dimension of the training.
“To achieve this, we must urge the farmers to take the training seriously”, he said, nudging the facilitators to be more practical, “so that our farmers will be more confident in applying their experience here in their various farms”.
Also speaking, the coordinator of SAPZ, Engineer Busari Toyin Isiaka, said that the capacity building for the farmers was a response to the crop component of the SAPZ project.
He posited that it is not enough to be a farmer, “it is nice to be a smart farmer and not just a farmer,” he stated.
Meanwhile, the Commissioner, had earlier, informed that the state government paid over N30billion to offset the backlog of workers’ salary, pension and gratuity owed by the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) government.
She said that civil servants in the state are now better for it, adding that, “every state government worker is now being taken care of and they are happy with the state government”.