Two presidents, six years apart, launched two flagship agricultural programmes intended to make Nigeria food-self-sufficient. Both failed. Together they cost more than the Second National Development Plan's entire agricultural allocation. Between them, they presided over the moment Nigeria stopped being a net food exporter and became the world's largest importer of rice, wheat and sugar.
## Operation Feed the Nation (OFN), 1976–1980
The launch. On 20 May 1976, three months after Murtala Muhammed's assassination, Head of State Olusegun Obasanjo launched Operation Feed the Nation at the National Arts Theatre construction site in Lagos. The programme had four pillars: (1) mass-produced subsidised seeds, fertiliser and equipment distributed through the Agricultural Development Projects (ADPs); (2) 'every Nigerian a farmer' — a national campaign asking every backyard and every secondary-school plot to grow food; (3) a national mobilisation of the new National Youth Service Corps (NYSC, established 1973) corps members and university undergraduates to teach modern agriculture in villages; (4) a federal procurement guarantee through the new Nigerian Agricultural and Co-operative Bank (NACB).
The imagery was vivid. *'Every Nigerian a Farmer'* posters went up on every Federal Ministry corridor. Lagos secondary schools planted vegetable plots. University vice-chancellors photographed themselves holding hoes. The federal television station, NTA, ran nightly OFN spots. Obasanjo himself was photographed at his Otta farm — the photograph that began his lifelong cultivation of the 'farmer-statesman' persona.
What it produced.
- Fertiliser imports rose from about 75,000 tonnes in 1975 to over 400,000 tonnes by 1979. The federal subsidy on fertiliser at the farm gate was set at 75 per cent of cost. A 50-kg bag that cost the government ₦12 to import was sold to farmers at ₦3.
- Food imports continued to rise. Wheat imports rose from 600,000 tonnes (1976) to 1.4 million tonnes (1980). Rice imports rose from 7,000 tonnes (1975) to 320,000 tonnes (1980). The fertiliser was being applied to land planted with traditional crops while urban consumers were switching to imported rice and bread.
- The subsidy was captured. Federal Ministry audits in 1979–80 found that less than 30 per cent of subsidised fertiliser reached the farmer. The rest was diverted by middlemen to neighbouring countries (Niger, Cameroon) where it sold at four to six times the Nigerian price.
- The NYSC element collapsed quickly. Corps members posted to villages without training, equipment or transport gave up within months.
## The Green Revolution, 1980–1983
The launch. On 6 April 1980, four months into the Second Republic, President Shehu Shagari launched the Green Revolution programme. The framing was deliberately distinct from OFN: where OFN had been a backyard-mobilisation campaign, the Green Revolution would be capital-intensive, machine-driven, dam-and-irrigation-based industrial agriculture modelled on the Indian and Mexican Green Revolutions of the 1960s.
The programme had four planks: (1) eleven River Basin Development Authorities to build dams, irrigation channels and reservoirs across the country (Sokoto-Rima, Hadejia-Jama'are, Chad, Upper Benue, Lower Benue, Cross River, Anambra-Imo, Benin-Owena, Niger, Ogun-Osun, Lower Niger); (2) the Agricultural Development Projects (ADPs), in partnership with the World Bank, in every state — large-scale tractor pools, extension services, on-farm trials; (3) the National Accelerated Food Production Programme (NAFPP) targeting rice, maize, wheat, cassava and yam; (4) substantial federal subsidy on fertiliser, seeds, tractors and agro-chemicals.
What it produced.
- Massive capital expenditure on dams. The Bakolori Dam (Sokoto State, completed 1978 but irrigation extension 1980–82) and the Kano River Project were the flagship sites. The Bakolori Massacre (April 1980) — the killing of an estimated 386 farmers protesting inadequate compensation for displaced land — is the single most-cited human-rights episode of the Shagari years. See Bakolori Massacre.
- Food imports doubled. Total food imports rose from about $1.4 billion in 1980 to $3.1 billion in 1983 at the peak — the highest food import bill in Nigerian history relative to GDP. Wheat imports passed 2 million tonnes a year. Rice imports passed 1 million tonnes a year. Sugar, fish, milk and powdered milk imports all set new records.
- The cocoa, palm-oil and groundnut export sectors collapsed. From the world's largest palm-oil exporter in 1965, Nigeria became a net importer of palm oil by 1981. From the second-largest cocoa exporter in 1970, output halved by 1983. The groundnut pyramids of Kano were dismantled and not rebuilt.
- The dams were under-utilised. Bakolori, Tiga, Kainji and Goronyo reservoirs were built. The downstream irrigation networks were not finished, were finished but not maintained, or served far less land than designed. The Bakolori scheme was meant to irrigate 30,000 hectares; it irrigated under 8,000 at its 1983 peak.
## Why both failed
The two programmes shared four structural defects:
- The overvalued naira. The petro-naira of 1976–83 made imported wheat, rice and sugar cheaper than the domestic equivalent. No fertiliser subsidy could close that gap. This is the Dutch disease in textbook form. See Dutch Disease.
- The urban food preference shift. OFN coincided with the moment urban Nigeria switched from yam, gari, sorghum and millet to bread and rice — a switch driven by the 24-hour workday of the urban formal sector and the convenience of pre-cooked imports. Backyard farming and dam construction had nothing to offer the new urban consumer.
- The procurement and storage failure. Both programmes built production capacity but no functioning marketing-board or strategic-grain-reserve system. The Marketing Boards had been abolished in 1977; the strategic reserve silos built under the Green Revolution were largely empty by 1985.
- Subsidy capture. Fertiliser, tractor-hire and seed subsidies were diverted to the political class and to cross-border smuggling at scale. The Federal Government audited and reported this in 1979 (under Obasanjo), 1983 (under Shagari) and 1986 (under Babangida); the leakage continued through each report.
## The legacy
- Nigeria today imports roughly 2 million tonnes of rice (despite domestic production of 5+ million tonnes), 5 million tonnes of wheat (it grows almost none), and over 1 million tonnes of sugar a year.
- Per-capita food production has fallen, in some staples, below the 1965 level. The agricultural-sector share of GDP has fallen from over 60 per cent at independence to under 25 per cent today, while the sector still employs roughly 35 per cent of the workforce.
- Every later programme — IBB's Directorate of Food, Roads and Rural Infrastructure (DFRRI, 1986); Obasanjo's Presidential Initiative on Cassava (2002); Jonathan's Agricultural Transformation Agenda (2011); Buhari's Anchor Borrowers' Programme (2015–22) — recycles elements of OFN and the Green Revolution.
- The fertiliser scam is now structural. Buhari's 2017 Presidential Fertiliser Initiative was the latest attempt to fix the procurement leakage. Federal audits in 2022 again found large-scale diversion.
Obasanjo planted vegetables in front of a camera. Shagari built dams that watered less land than promised. Forty-five years later, Nigeria still imports food it grew enough of in 1960.