By Ayo Akinfe
(1) Over recent years Nigerian political discourse has been dominated by the Fulani herdsmen saga but what is most disappointing is that nobody has come up with a formula to turn this matter into a cash cow. Being an ethnic Fulani himself who keeps cows, I would have thought that President Muhammadu Buhari would have been vehement about making the sector a great money spinner
(2) Cattle produce all sorts of products including meat, leather products, milk, cheese, butter, yoghurt, etc. Why have we not even began discussing how to make this a huge revenue earner for Nigeria? With crude oil prices dropping on a daily basis, we do not really have any choice. It is sectors like livestock that will generate the revenue we are losing through falling petroleum prices
(3) I wonder if President Buhari is aware of the Arla Foods milk processing plant in Aylesbury in the UK? It is the world’s largest such facility producing 1.5m litres of milk a day
(4) Within 24 hours, this plant gets milk from the cow to the supermarket. It also has ancillary factories that produce other milk by-products, including cheese, butter, yoghurt and ice cream
(5) What fascinated me about this facility is how mechanised it is. Not content with mechanising the factory, they are now mechanising the farms too. All the local cows are now milked by robots. Yes, you heard that right. In the surrounding countryside, the cows self-milk by walking up to a machine and discharging their milk
(6) Arla is the largest supplier of fresh milk and cream in the UK, producing over 2.2bn litres of milk every year. It produces two premium milk brands — Cravendale filtered milk, which undergoes a filtration process to remove bacteria before pasteurisation and Lactofree milk, from which lactose is removed. This process is all completed within 24 hours
(7) There are 9.92m cows in the UK and 15m cows in Nigeria. Can someone please explain to me why the UK produces more milk than Nigeria
(8) Arla Foods generates an annual revenue of £1.67bn in the UK. I am waiting for someone to explain to me why Nigeria is not generating at least $2bn annually from milk production given that we have nearly twice as many cows as them
(9) Our problem as a people is just blatant intellectual laziness. Do we even look at the opportunities on our doorstep? Has any Nigerian minister ever approached Arla Foods and asked them to come and open a milk factory in Nigeria?
(10) If Arla Foods came to Nigeria, the first thing they would do is get all the cattle farmers to settle their livestock down into farms. You cannot milk cows roaming around the countryside or manufacture nomadic milking machines. If we are serious, we could easily turn the Fulani herdsmen menace into a great money spinner
