There was a moment in class where a facilitator said something and the room went quiet. We started pulling apart Nigeria's import data. Not abstractly. Specifically. Line by line. We import tomato paste. Tomato. Paste. A country where tomatoes rot on farms in Kaduna and Kano because there is no cold chain, no processing plant close enough, no off-taker willing to pay a fair price. Those same tomatoes come back to us in tins, processed in China and Europe, at prices Nigerian farmers will never capture. We do this with fish. With rice. With juice. With cooking oil. We grow the raw material and import the product.
That conversation followed me home. Because I finance this sector, and I had to ask myself an uncomfortable question: whether the financing I structure is actually solving the problem, or just lubricating a broken system more efficiently. I do not have a clean answer yet.
A structural story, not a poverty story
The problem is not that Nigerians cannot farm. Walk through any rural corridor in Ondo, Benue, Kebbi or Kaduna. The land is alive. The problem is what happens after the harvest. The moment the crop leaves the farm gate, Nigeria loses: in storage, in transportation, in processing, at the port. The margin that should be building national wealth leaks out at every node. And then we borrow foreign exchange to import the processed version of what we just exported raw. This is not a poverty story. This is a structural story. And structures can be changed.
The solutions are known. Patient capital into agro-processing. Cold chain infrastructure treated as seriously as roads and power. Financiers, processors, farmers and government finally talking in the same room instead of parallel ones.
I am not writing this as an observer. I sit across from exporters and processors regularly. I see exactly where capital reaches and where it stops. Which means I carry some responsibility here, and I have decided I am not comfortable carrying it quietly. Nigeria cannot wait for perfect conditions. The people who understand this sector have to start acting like the changemakers they are positioned to be. The seat at the table exists. I am already sitting in it. The question now is what I do with that.