He said: “if we hadn’t gone back to the lands, we would have been in trouble by now. That is why we virtually stopped the importation of food thereby saving jobs and foreign exchange.”
The President, who spoke today, September 15, at a virtual meeting with members of the Presidential Economic Advisory Council (PEAC) at the Presidential Villa, in Abuja, said that his government had to resort to agriculture for the purpose of, among others, reducing joblessness and poverty.
“For us to bounce back to productivity, especially in agriculture, the unemployed with many of them uneducated, had to be persuaded to go into agriculture.”
Buhari stressed the onerous challenges posed by the collapse of the oil market and the decision of government to abide by the reduced oil production quota allocated by the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).
“We have to accept that decision; otherwise they (Middle-East producers) can flood the market and make the product unviable. So we have cooperated with what we get.
“With oil, we are in a difficult situation. The politics of oil is that the less you produce, the less you earn.”
