President Muhammadu Buhari has urged Nigerian youths to immediately stop their migration to European countries through the Mediterranean Sea.
President Muhammadu Buhari
Restates commitment to provision of employment through agriculture
President Muhammadu Buhari has urged Nigerian youths to immediately stop their migration to European countries through the Mediterranean Sea.
Buhari said this at the 32rd Annual Meeting of the Sahel and West Africa organised by the Food Crisis Prevention Network in Abuja yesterday.
The president, who was represented by the Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Chief Audu Ogbeh, said it was unfair to European countries.
Buhari however, said the revitalisation of agriculture was a solution to the migration issue and expressed his readiness to support farmers to boost local production in the country.
According to the president, “We are at pains when we see our youths across West and North Eastern Africa cross the desert, get to Libya and cross the Mediterranean Sea to Europe in dangerous conditions. We consider it as something that must stop.
He said government was not unmindful of unemployment, hence the need to ensure that the agriculture sector was revitalised to provide jobs as soon as possible.
“We have decided that we will no longer rely on rainfall, we will create dams, water reservoirs and insist on harvesting food at least three times in a year,” the president assured.
On food crisis, he described the threat as real, saying urgent steps were necessary to address the challenge.
According to him, there are 800 million hectares of agricultural lands across the world yet to be cultivated and Africa owns half of them. He thus appealed to Sahel and West African agricultural stakeholders to devise ideas that would guarantee better management in cattle breeding through artificial insemination.
Buhari, however, said his administration was aggressively tackling humanitarian crisis of the internally displaced persons (IDPs) by attending to issues of food and nutrition, especially for women and children in the North East.
