PUBLIC POLICY AND RURAL DEVELOPMENT IN NIGERIA

AN APPRAISAL OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT FADAMA PROGRAM

Abstract

Rural development is at the heart of sustainable national development of developing nations. It is a means of ensuring that the rural sector of the population have fair share of socioeconomic activities and gains that makes life habitable for rural populace without resulting to mass rural-urban migration in search of social amenities and quality life. As such, public policies should drive rural development as pragmatic means towards providing public facilities and economic opportunities for the relative comfort of rural dwellers. However, due to absence of well articulated programme or poor implementation or inconsistency of policy programme on rural development, there has been much variation in the administration and performance of rural development programme in Nigeria. The efforts made by successive governments have been at its worse more of propaganda as much of the rural areas are rather characterized by dearth of infrastructure, roads, health, water and poor electricity supply including the impacts of all of these on food production. Meanwhile, there has been a federal government initiative for rural development through agriculture called FADAMA. FADAMA is a World Bank assisted programme designed to promote simple and low cost improved agricultural technology and farm support for rural farmers. This paper is an appraisal of this FADAMA program especially that since 2017 that FADAMA III terminated, there has not been any public expression of interest by the federal government to proceed to phase IV of the programme. Therefore, this paper is an advocacy for the resumption of the FADAMA IV program as a rural development policy through agricultural practice. The paper adopted the endogenous theory of rural development and utilized historical and descriptive approaches in analysing data and information sourced mainly from secondary domains. The paper found that FADAMA in its first three phases have contributed meaningfully to the transformation of rural areas in the local governments that have benefited from the program. And that whereas there were certain impediments to the full realization of its core objectives, FADAMA programs contributed to the uplifting of lives of rural farmers, their dependents and the rural populace. The impediments observed in literature include chronic political interference and serious leadership deficit at the local governments that are suppose to be the primary drivers of the programme in their areas. The paper strongly recommended the resumption of phase IV of the initiative by the Federal Government, after strengthening the legal and institutional frameworks for the design and implementation of the programme in a way that it can achieve far more results that the previous phases by transforming the lives of the rural settlers through improved agricultural interventions.