The Acting President, Professor Yemi Osinbajo, has ordered the payment of 1.7 billion naira as balance of compensation package for poultry farmers whose farms were destroyed by avian flu in 2015.
Osinbajo gave this order after a meeting with members of the Poultry Association of Nigeria at the State House, Abuja on Friday.
According to the Minister of State for Agriculture, Heineken Lokpobiri, who spoke to State House correspondents after the meeting, although part of the compensation had been paid, about N1.7 billion was still outstanding.
He said the acting president instructed that “we should liaise with the Ministry of Finance to see how we can get that sorted out.”
The poultry farmers were said to have lost almost four million birds to the incident.
The Acting President also ordered the Nigerian Customs Service (NCS) to improve surveillance around Nigeria’s borders and check smuggling of frozen chicken.
Osinbajo said the move was part of an urgent effort to address challenges in the poultry business.
They also complained of non-allocation of Foreign Exchange for the importation of machineries and high cost of production.
“The poultry industry is a local industry that needs to be protected urgently,” Osinbajo said, adding that poultry is supposed to be a major plank of the agriculture sector.
He added that by supporting the local industry, poultry related importation which is currently a drain on the country’s Foreign Exchange would be a thing of the past.
In his remarks, Dr. Ayoola Oduntan, who led the delegation of the association to present industry challenges to the Presidency, noted that poultry presently contributes 25 per cent of the Agricultural Gross Domestic Product of the Nigerian economy amounting to N1.6 trillion.
He added that Nigeria is rated as the number one egg-producing nation in Africa, and number four poultry meat producer in the continent.
Lokpobiri, told State House correspondents that government was prepared to take whatever measure necessary to address the challenges of the poultry sub-sector.
“In the short term, the Federal Government has intervened to have maize available for the poultry industry.
The other issue has to do with smuggling, part of the reasons we have a lot of people down with certain diseases we don’t know; the health hazard due to consumption of frozen chicken.
Most times they used what they use to preserve dead bodies to preserve these frozen foods and it causes harm to the kidney.
Customs too was in the meeting and was charged on how to improve their surveillance programme so that we stop that.
We discussed other issues about agric equipment which people will benefit from the policy of zero duties and essentially to see how we can intervene in the poultry industry with membership of over 15 million people.
I can proudly say it is the most organised and because we have a huge market, we have a duty to intervene,” he said.
Also present at the meeting were the Finance Minister, Mrs. Kemi Adeosun, Comptroller-General of the Nigerian Customs Service, Col. Hameed Ali (rtd) and the Central Bank of Governor Godwin Emefiele.
