Looking for Transwonderland (38 page)

After so many weeks of travelling in disagreeable conditions, staying positive about Nigeria was difficult when economic success constantly taunted us from the horizon. With oil now costing $140 (
21,000) a barrel, politicians' complacency over the economy had only deepened, and people were still suffering in the Niger Delta. I tried to envision Ogoniland as an oil-free economy in which we modernised the farming that's sustained us so well for centuries. Fleetingly, I fantasised about a California-style food industry, free from oil spills, with me as a modern farmer exporting fruit and palm oil to foreign markets. My paternal grandfather would be proud.

‘When I came to England I saw people tending to their little farms,' he once observed while giving me a lecture about the virtues of toil. ‘They were working
hard
.' Bemused, I wondered how he could mistake a front garden for a farm. But in Nigeria, the two can resemble one another. Our farming is largely a small-scale affair with no machinery or fertilizer, just women bent over and sowing, planting and reaping. Whenever my grandmother or aunt said that they were ‘going to the farm', I would visualise these diminutive women
in their wrappas and headscarves, whistling behind the wheel of a tractor. It was very confusing. I didn't realise that they and the women bending over by the roadside were growing crops – they always looked like they were doing a spot of gardening.

Small-scale farmers like my aunty don't grow enough crops to feed Nigeria's population, which means the country has to import nearly $750 million worth of food. To alleviate the situation, the western state of Kwara plans on mechanising its farms. When Zimbabwe's government declared that it would appropriate farms belonging to white Zimbabweans in 2004, the Kwara State government saw an opportunity and invited thirteen landless Zimbabweans to set up a mechanised agriculture business in Kwara on a twenty-five-year lease. The farmers settled near the town of Ilorin on the Tsonga farms, an area cultivated by the Muslim Nupe people. Some of the Nupe were paid to move off their farms so that the Zimbabweans could start producing soya beans, rice, cassava and dairy products.

For the first six months, while their houses were being built, the Zimbabweans lived like pioneers in makeshift tents. Now, their newly constructed homes were surrounded by verdant lawns, swimming pools and the obligatory dogs maintaining hostilities at the gate. I loved the way these farmers could transfer their know-how to other parts of the world and create oases of high living. Knowledge is such a beautiful, powerful thing.

Initially, some of the Nupe people weren't happy about handing over their land to the Zimbabweans. They believed their farms were being unfairly seized. The Emir of Tsonga was accused of knowingly persuading village leaders (some of whom were illiterate) to sign away their land. In protest, several villagers invaded the emir's palace on his daughter's wedding day to deliver their complaints in person. This new system was too confusing and daunting, they grumbled: complex legalities, new agricultural practices, alien crops. Over time, however, the Nupe broadly accepted the situation, after
being mollified by the government's offer of re-allocated land, seeds, equipment, chemicals and cash.

My driver dropped me off outside a milk factory. Shouting above the din of construction work, I asked if I could speak to the farmer in charge. A Nupe man led me to a black Zimbabwean called Onias, who was sitting in an office with his white boss. Dan Swaart was an ex-tobacco farmer, a big man with bright blue eyes, leathery brown arms buried beneath a forest of blond hairs, and a cheery disposition that belied the trauma of being jailed by Mugabe and losing his home. Counting stacks of
500 notes piled up on the table near some machinery, Dan paused to give me a friendly handshake.

‘Is farming very different in Nigeria?' I asked.

‘You have to adapt to the climate and the soil,' he said. ‘They've been using this soil for years without fertiliser, so we had to get the right nutrients into it.'

‘How does working with Nigerians compare with working with Zimbabweans?'

‘They haven't been trained,' Dan said. ‘Zimbabweans are disciplined, but here there's no discipline, so you have to bring discipline and teach them to work. They're used to lying under a mango tree for eight hours a day and working for two hours of the day,' Dan laughed. ‘So that's a mindset you have to change. But they're good people.'

‘How do you communicate with them?'

‘We've got supervisors and they speak English. But you know, you speak English to them and they can't understand your English. They talk this pidgin English. They really don't understand,' he beamed. ‘When you first get here – especially on the telephone – they're difficult to understand. But once you get the gist, then you're in.'

Dan's aim was to ‘pass the knowledge' on to the Nigerians, set up the machinery, get it working and train the people. The
Zimbabweans are teaching the Nupe all the other aspects of mechanised farming, including how to clear their lands properly and plant with planters.

‘You can see them starting to clear their land and starting to think about fertiliser, spacing the planting of your crop properly rather than scattering it like chicken feed,' Dan grinned. ‘There's never really been mechanised agriculture in this country. You import sugar, you import rice. They are very sticky on agriculture, but we have changed the mindset. As time goes on you'll start seeing all the businesses getting loans. At first the banks really didn't want to know about agriculture. But now they're giving us money. When we first started, the most anybody could get was
10 million. We've pushed that to
600 million. It's an enormous difference.'

Their project wasn't without hindrances. During the first two seasons, the Zimbabweans' harvest of imported corn, soya bean and cowpea was not successful, and only 300 of the 13,000 hectares of land had been cultivated. But these problems were caused by financing hiccups, Dan said. Things were improving now.

This was not the first time that foreigners had tried commercial farming in the area. The British, eyeing the region's heavy rainfall and fertile soil, planted imported soya beans, corn and cotton during the first half of the twentieth century. But the crops failed, disrupting a millennium of local agriculture and forcing the colonial authorities to revert to growing groundnuts, cashews and locust beans. This time round, the farmers hope to use a new breed of fertilisers to avoid a repeat of the problem.

‘How are you finding life in Nigeria?' I asked Dan.

‘There's not much of a social life. You don't have theatre, you don't have cinemas, you don't have decent restaurants. Lagos is all right, but we live here. It's a different life to what we had in Zimbabwe. Nigeria is not as bad as people make out. You know, it's a great place. You cannot believe the opportunities for any businessman here. Nigeria is a huge, huge market, and if people just
changed their mindset they would reap the benefits like you cannot
believe
. It's a rich country with huge potential. Just bring the technology and you're away.'

‘I'm so glad you're bringing fresh milk here,' I told him. ‘I can never have the kind of breakfast I want because there's never proper milk! Do you think Nigerians will like pasteurised milk?'

‘You know, Nigerians say they don't like fresh milk, but once the people taste it, they'll drink it.'

I let Dan get on with his work. Onias offered to show me around the milk factory currently under construction: milk cooling tanks, pasteurisation tanks and homogenisers, even a machine for packaging long-life milk. Their aim is to pump 45,000 litres a day.

Onias pointed at a map of Africa on the wall and ran his finger along the northern borders of Angola, Zambia and Tanzania. ‘There are 120 million people here,' he said, circling Southern Africa. ‘And there are 150 million here,' he pointed at Nigeria. ‘Amazing! I think Nigeria has got more opportunities than Zimbabwe. It's one of the richest countries in the world. We are going where you are coming from, and you are going where we are coming from!'

Onias radiated enthusiasm and professionalism, always greeting the local people by removing his baseball cap and bowing. He lacked that swagger of the businessman who has grown wealthy through government corruption. A self-described ‘heathen' (the only one I encountered in Nigeria), Onias was a professional milkman, born and bred into a cattle-rearing community in Zimbabwe where he learnt to milk cows at the age of four. He became the managing director of the biggest dairy in Zimbabwe before moving to Nigeria with Dan Swaart as the only black man among the Zimbabweans.

‘I feel we blacks have a moral obligation to help Dan and the others with the project,' Onias said quietly.

‘Why? You didn't take away their farms.'

Onias shrugged his shoulders.

‘How are you finding life in Nigeria?' I asked.

‘I try to enjoy Nigerian music, and sometimes I eat the food.'

‘Have you tried gari?'

‘Yes. It was . . . nice,' he stammered diplomatically. ‘It's similar to our sadza . . . it's a starch.'

Onias said Nigerian attitudes to farming were very different to Zimbabwe's.

‘My two Nigerian friends, they are doctors, they came here to see the farm. They could not believe I was working here on a farm like this! Nigerians don't want to come near cows. They see it as inferior. Only the Fulanis like cows.'

We climbed into his 4 x 4 and toured the Tsonga farms, through flat stretches of soya fields, rice fields and colossal anthills. The Zimbabweans were planning on building chicken abattoirs and an ethanol plant too. All in all, they employed 600 full-time Nupe workers, for whom mechanised farming represented a big cultural shift.

‘In the factory we have a big problem on Fridays. They just disappear,' Onias said. ‘I said to one guy, “How can I make you a machine operator if you leave it while it's still running?”'