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Fascinating that the article mentions access to capital and land rights/ownership but they didn’t talk at all about the other big challenge that prevents agriculture from succeeding in Nigeria: lack of infrastructure. Roads, power, and communication are extremely crucial. https://twitter.com/kinjeketile/status/1320257246174056448
Also, I’m sure that the big agricultural companies (JD etc) have invested more in their local dealers in Brazil than in Nigeria. The folks we deal with here often know less than my own team, charge through the nose, and take months to get simple parts like fuses.
Finally, a fun side story. In January 2015 I was at a party in Lagos and I met the Wilson’s Lemonade guys and they told me I HAD to meet with “Aunty O” - Chris’s wife. She had a small tomato paste business in Ikeja (they also did sachet spices and cheese puffs).
I went to visit Aunty O and she told me all about how she had always wanted to support someone exactly like me to do what I was trying to do, help farmers in Nigeria by making a local tomato paste brand. She offered to sell me her sacheting machine as she closing down her biz.
Apparently she did the math & she could make more money simply renting out her Ikeja property than making all the different products she was trying to make. Also worth noting that just because all the products were in sachets, doesn’t mean they should all have been made together.
Anyway, I got to the warehouse/factory to assess the machine and everything else except for these two tomato paste sacheting machines had already been sold - there was no generator or anything for me to confirm that either one worked.
I called her and she promised me up and down that the thing worked perfectly, I would be very happy about it. Fam, I can’t even complain. This is a “let the buyer beware” cautionary tale. I bought one of the machines and the accompanying air compressor without ever seeing it run.
You can guess where this story is heading. I transported the machine up to Zaria where I was working with NARICT to try and make tomato paste, and we couldn’t get it to work. At ALL. After their engineering team tried, I called Aunty O’s operator and paid him to come from Lagos.
The guy couldn’t fix it either. We called the OEM & even flew one of their engineers up from Lagos. He gave me a list of items to buy and said he’d come back once we bought them. I paid 1 million naira for the machine & another 1M for these parts, which I had to ship from India.
We got the parts, the OEM guy came back... still the machine wouldn’t work. A Cameroonian friend of mine who is an electrical engineer (used to work at GE) even came to visit to try & make it work. He got us farther than anyone else had but the heating elements still had issues.
Also, it was only filling in one track. Whyyyy?! 
At this time, my mentor @ndidiNwuneli gave me a lot of comfort. She told me that even at AACE Foods, they had what she called an “equipment graveyard” full of machinery that turned out to be useless.
At this time, my mentor @ndidiNwuneli gave me a lot of comfort. She told me that even at AACE Foods, they had what she called an “equipment graveyard” full of machinery that turned out to be useless.
Ndidi told me that this is a normal part of running a business. You make mistakes. Sometimes they are expensive mistakes. But you learn from them, and you move on.
So... that was how I learned to be EXTREMELY wary of anything I buy, even if it comes from a reputable someone.
So... that was how I learned to be EXTREMELY wary of anything I buy, even if it comes from a reputable someone.
