The Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Chief Audu Ogbeh says the agriculture sector created six million jobs in the last two years.
Ogbeh said this while analysing the achievements of his ministry and 2018 targets of the ministry at a strategy retreat in Abuja last Monday.
The minister was reacting to reports that over four million jobs had been lost in over two years of President Muhammadu Buhari-led Federal Government.
He explained that the six million jobs were created both on and off farms as a result of the huge increase in local rice production.
According to him, our agriculture is heavily manual and to be able to reduce rice importation by 95 per cent, at least six million extra jobs have happened in the farm.
“There are about 12.2 million members of the Rice Growers Association; we have created more jobs than we have lost,’’ he said.
The minister said the country earned 31 million dollars from the sale of purple hibiscus popularly known as zobo leaves in the last one year and that the demand was still increasing.
“We are exporting more than we are importing now and most exportation is agro-products.
“We are growing in agriculture and from the middle of this year; whoever chooses to eat Thailand rice is welcomed to pay duties.
“We shall impose duties on it because we consider it a wasteful luxury and something this country can’t afford,’’ he said.
According to him, when subscribers send “Stop” to the provided code operators, they still charge them for sending the messages and continue sending the unsolicited messages.
The Tide recalls that in 2016, NCC introduced the 2442 Do-Not-Disturb code.
The Executive Vice Chairman of NCC, Prof Umar Danbatta, had said at various fora that the short code would enable the consumers to opt out of SMS platforms they did not subscribe to.
Reports also say that as at December 2017, 10,000 telecommunications consumers had activated the code, according to statistics from NCC.