St. Louis CofCC Blog

Why couldn’t they be America’s gain?

Chrisitan Science Monitor:

White Zimbabweans bring change to Nigeria

Shonga, Nigeria - Musa Mogadi says he is better off since “the whites” came. He’s got a new job, learned new farming skills, and he can chat on a mobile phone while zipping around the countryside on a motorbike.

Three years ago, Mr. Mogadi got by as a subsistence farmer. But he now earns a regular wage as a supervisor on one of this town’s new commercial farms.

He’s applied skills he learned from some of the two dozen white Zimbabwean farmers who moved to Nigeria in 2005, after being kicked off their land by President Robert Mugabe and later attracted by large parcels of land on offer under 25-year leases and commitments of support from the Nigerian government.

Production on his farm is now up.

“We are starting to use fertilizers,” says Mogadi, explaining that he was encouraged to buy fertilizer after seeing yield benefits on the commercial farm. He’s also started planting his maize in a more compact formation, like the Zimbabweans, increasing production from each field planted.

Before the Zimbabweans arrived, there was no mobile phone network in the area and so no reason to have a mobile phone. Now he and most of the other workers have snazzy cellphones, and many have bought motorbikes imported from China, often with a loan from their employer.

In the future, when the national power network reaches the Shonga farms, Mogadi is looking forward to having electricity in his home and village for the first time.

Kenny Oyewo, who works as a farm manager, thinks the lessons being learned in Shonga should be exported across Nigeria.

The trouble is, even if it helps Nigerians, as the whites become more prosperous and influential, the racial hate and jealousy of them will also increase, which will lead to a Mugabe-like figure running Nigeria.