I have written about this amazing Nigerian company named Okomu Oil Plc. It is neither a tech nor a bank, a major reason I respect what it has accomplished at a higher level. Yes, this company has provided a validation that wealth can be built via agriculture in Nigeria. And interestingly, investors like the dance steps the company is showing in the market.
Its market value continues to climb, outperforming the market index: “revenue grew by 63% to N20.49 billion from N12.55 billion in Q1 2021, just as profit after tax jumped by 80.2 per cent to N9.50 billion from N5.27 billion in the same period last year.”
When we talk of GDP, we are talking of the market value of total goods and services produced within a period, usually a year. It provides the aggregate of economic activities which are deployed in the production of goods and services over the period.
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While oil gives us huge fat foreign bank accounts, the associated economic activities in the sector are limited. You do not need so many (diverse) activities to produce barrels of crude oil. But when you come to agriculture, you see massive activities making it possible that you can use one stone to kill two birds, especially if the agro-products can find export lanes.
Agriculture remains the largest component of our GDP; companies like Okomu Oil deserve to be used as case studies to demonstrate how a future can emerge, if we make agriculture a business, not just activities aligned with ancestral culture! Yes, I am farming because my ancestors farmed in this land even though you are creating more hunger doing it because of archaic practices at play.
Nigeria must make agriculture a business – Okomu Oil is showing how to do just that.
Okomo Oil, Nigeria’s biggest producer of crude palm oil and the second-biggest producer of rubber recently released its Q1 2022 three-month report, which shows it recorded revenue of N20.49 billion, the highest ever quarterly result by the company.
Data sourced from the NGX showed that the growth in revenue is driven by export sales due to the surge in CPO price influenced by the Russian/Ukraine crisis and sustained supply issues in the international market.
A further cursory view of the report shows that revenue grew by 63% to N20.49 billion from N12.55 billion in Q1 2021, just as profit after tax jumped by 80.2 per cent to N9.50 billion from N5.27 billion in the same period last year and thus earnings per share grew by 80 per cent to N9.96 from N5.53 in Q1 2021
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Is there really a sector here Nigeria has come anywhere close to fully exploring? Our problem is deeply entrenched, it’s either you have politicians who have no clue on how to create wealth or investors who don’t believe that their money can grow when invested in certain sectors. We starve many sectors of funds, partly because we do not have knowledge of how they operate, and there is even no urgency to grow knowledge in those areas.
We are looking for average countries to escape to, while sitting idly on great wealth here.
How many financial institutions or investment funds understand how the education sector works? How many have built knowledge base in healthcare, and how about mining, even the agriculture we always talk about? We abhor knowledge here.
God creates, man discovers, but we have been too slow and incompetent at discovering, so we keep underperforming.
We do not need to wait for great success story before we know what works, think of what would have happened if Okomu Oil never got funds to advance its operations. We don’t produce enough starch here, we don’t produce enough corn here, yet these basic things have diverse industrial uses; but we are still praying for miracles, while God is puzzled at our ignorance.