I appreciate the problem diagnoses of the following article “Nigeria needs 5,000 cold trucks, 100 cold rooms to curb N3.5 trillion post-harvest losses”; but disagree with the approach to the solution.
Why? From the perspective of African nation-building:
Essence is the principle; form is the preference.
A patient with a migraine does not need Tylenol but a solution to their headache which can come in many forms! Solution is the essence; Tylenol is a form. Physicians in Western medical schools are taught to prescribe, so their solutions are typically a “pill-based” reliance on big pharma. Similarly, African people today are taught to buy “ready-made forms” from the West as solutions, instead of developing/exploring different potential forms to address the essence!
The need here is not a “cold truck” (form), but a preserving storage with mobility (essence). Cold trucks are AN option, not THE solution. Cold trucks require inputs that many African countries may not have sufficiently developed (infrastructure, energy, technology etc), so then they rely on Western imports and maintenance.
We first need to see if there are existing indigenous storage systems among the African people that is already suited to the environment and more agile. Next you improve, modernize, and scale it. The people would then own the homegrown technology and not be dependent on imports for their agricultural value chain. Yet I understand there is a transition period which requires a dual approach until you fully build domestic capacity.
More broadly, what Nigeria needs is an aggressive 30-year ASDP—Agricultural Sovereignty Development Plan. A comprehensive plan to domestically buildout all factors of production, inputs, systems, and institutions along the agricultural value chain to establish agricultural sovereignty In Nigeria; whose capacity and productivity will make Nigeria the breadbasket of Africa and the chief supplier of agricultural goods globally.
Such growth can only happen and be maintained when it is built on indigenous systems that come from within the people i.e., when “essence” is developed into indigenous “forms”, and all foreign inputs ( “forms”) are adapted to the cultural context of the African people. However, it takes visionary political leadership with the right concept and approach to development to undertake true African nation-building!
Today Nigerian political leadership is abysmal (and since post-independence has been so with but few exceptions), therefore they are generally incapable of solving this problem. Change will only happen when visionary nation-builders take possession of political office in Nigeria and, with an iron-will for the good and sound strategy, aggressively drive development forward for the complete transformation of Nigeria.
~Dr. Ikenna A. Ezealah, Ph.D., MBA
“Builder of the African Future”
Nation Upbuilding 