Garba Hamidu Sharubutu

Garba Hamidu Sharubutu is a Nigerian agricultural scientist, a veterinary doctor and the executive secretary, Agricultural Research Council of Nigeria. He represents Nigeria on the Board of Trustees of the African Agricultural Technology Foundation. Quotes I met the ARCN at a certain stage of its development that was not pleasant. Capacity was greatly depleted, the ability to perform functions was very low, the National Assembly had denied it funding and the Ministry of Agriculture was barely trying to tolerate us. Remember that the function of the ARCN is to advise the government on policy issues that have to do with research, coordinate research and seek funding for research. Now, when the foundation executive secretary was running the ARCN, it was viable, but because of the depletion in capacity, most of the funding gave way. And unfortunately, the subsequent leadership was not properly positioned to run because a non-technical person was heading. Secondly, apart from capacity, there was also leadership crisis. The agric minister, however, gave us the mandate to settle the various crises. We had over 15 headship tussles, but within a short time, we settled all these. And there is too much traffic of our personnel to the universities. We have 26 research and training institutes in Nigeria, four of them belong to the universities. When we train staff up to PhD level, they move to universities because the conditions are better. They benefit from TetFund, PTF, CBN, NDIC etc. They are better than research institutes that depend solely on budgetary allocations, and maybe foreign aid, which is dwindling. Then we are managing the little equipment we have. Thank God that what Minister Nanono is bringing has to do with national agricultural technical and innovation platform. The National Assembly has also tried, especially the House of Reps, in setting up a separate committee for agric research institutions and colleges. What I did was to set up various committees, including the Staff Audit Committee, which submitted their report. We are now implementing recommendations of the committee, putting square pegs in the right places. I also set up a Monitoring and Evaluation Committee to monitor, on a regular basis, how we are conducting our affairs, whether it is in line with government’s policy on agriculture.