How Politics Gets In The Way Of Our Food —Emir Muhammadu Sanusi II

At the AgriconnectX Summit 2026 in Lagos, HRH Muhammadu Sanusi II offered a different way of looking at Nigeria’s agriculture problem. The former CBN governor did not start with the farmer's struggle with input, finance or market. Instead, he began with the system around the farmer.

The Emir of Kano argued that an agricultural value chain can only be as strong as its weakest link. One of those links is the quality of the people making policy.

With his experience and history at the highest level of economic policymaking in Nigeria, he asked a difficult question: What happens when the people responsible for building the bridge are themselves disconnected from the problem they are trying to solve?

A Front Seat to an Insider’s Perspective

Sanusi's discourse was grounded in personal experience. Before becoming CBN governor, he had worked in banking, including as a chief risk officer at United Bank for Africa Plc (UBA) and First Bank of Nigeria.

His early experience with agricultural lending was discouraging. At UBA, he revealed that most of the agricultural loans the bank issued became bad loans. The experience was so poor that he eventually stopped the bank from lending to the sector.

But when he moved to First Bank, he encountered something different. The bank had a significant performing agricultural loan portfolio. This experience forced him to reconsider his assumption of the sector as a whole. Perhaps the problem wasn't agricultural lending itself but how it was executed.

Maybe banks needed to understand the sector better. Maybe the financial products were wrong. Maybe the value chains themselves were properly organised. That distinction would become the foundation of much of his later thinking.

Agriculture was not necessarily too risky to finance. Instead, it was being financed without sufficiently understanding the system that produced the risk.

The CBN Could Not Fix Agriculture By Itself

Sanusi became CBN governor during a banking crisis. He described entering an industry whose balance sheets had become disconnected from the real economy. He argued that too much money was flowing into areas such as shares, petroleum imports and subsidies, instead of into actual production, especially agriculture.

The economist said he wanted to help build a banking system connected to the productive economy, but he quickly encountered a problem.

The CBN could not simply direct banks to lend to agriculture, and a monetary policy could not substitute for agricultural policy. While the apex bank could provide financial incentives and risk-sharing mechanisms such as NIRSAL, the government still had to decide on seeds, production, processing, markets, infrastructure and the regulatory environment.

Sanusi described working with agricultural experts to examine six agricultural value chains. They went beyond farming, examining the chain from seeds and fertiliser to planting, agronomic practices, risk, processing and markets.

They had used tomato for the study because Sanusi knew the scale of tomato production around Kano. Nigeria produced large quantities of tomatoes, yet it lacked adequate processing capacity and was importing tomato paste.

The contradiction was difficult to ignore; a country capable of producing the raw material was importing the processed product. They found that the problem was not simply production but a lack of structure.

Who Gets To Run Agriculture?

In 2011, after evaluating the agricultural value chain, the governor of Nigeria's central bank became concerned that all the work could remain on paper. Banks would not lend unless the government fixed the agricultural system.

Sanusi said he had worked with an individual whom he believed understood Nigerian agriculture and knew how to address the sector's problems. So he personally took the person's CV to the president. He said he was not a politician and that central-bank governors typically didn't help choose ministers. Yet, he believed the appointment mattered enough to intervene. 

The man was initially offered a minister-of-state position, but he advised him not to accept it because he would lack the authority required to implement the reforms they had discussed. The man returned to Nairobi.

Later, Sanusi raised the matter directly with President Goodluck Jonathan and the vice president. He realised he had not been offered the full agriculture ministry role because the governing party had zoned the ministry to the North. Political negotiations within the party had constrained their options.

"Did the North need a northern agriculture minister or did Nigeria need the best agriculture minister?" Sanusi asked the audience.

Eventually, a political compromise allowed the North to receive the Ministry of Water Resources while the candidate took the role of Minister of Agriculture.

As minister, Sanusi said that his candidate, Dr Akinwumi Adesina, showed results that justified his appointment.

For me, the main lesson was that competent political appointees will implement effective policies.

Another clear example is the current and pioneer Minister of Livestock Development, Minister Idi Mukhtar Maiha, whose background in Animal Science and proven track record in livestock farming are reflected in his decision-making and project focus. 

Conclusion

Government policies, political appointments, financing structures and regulatory consistency heavily influence Nigeria's agricultural productivity. The Emir stressed that competent leadership and predictable policies are essential to building investor confidence, while financial incentives and risk-sharing mechanisms can encourage banks to lend to agriculture.

He also highlighted NIRSAL’s role in reducing agricultural lending risks through credit guarantees, insurance and repayment incentives, rather than replacing commercial banks. According to Sanusi, the right policies helped increase agricultural lending from about 0.5% to 7% of bank portfolios within two years, while reportedly reducing bad loans to almost zero.