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Last November, in keeping with the Transformation Agenda of President Goodluck Jonathan and the resolve by the Honourable Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, to steer the agricultural sector away from the age-long practice that sees it as a developmental project into a private sector led business that is a major driver of the economy, the Tony Elumelu Foundation (TEF) placed its first Tony Elumelu Fellow, Ada Osakwe, in the ministry to help push this transformation strategy.

The Tony Elumelu Fellowship Programme keys into the Foundation’s desire to provide private sector expertise to strategic government ministries engaging significantly with the private sector. Fellows are selected through a process that is intensely competitive as well as transparent.

The candidates that are eventually selected as fellows have the most appropriate skill sets to ensure the needs of the ministries are met. The fellows are also selected based on the high quality of their work experience, results-orientation, and ability to transfer knowledge and build the capacity of the ministries.

Osakwe perfectly fits the bill, with a first class Honours degree in Economics from the University of Hull and an MBA in Finance, Entrepreneur and Marketing from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management where she emerged one of the winners in the school’s Four Pillar Awards (Global Perspective Award). She worked an analyst at BNP Paribas Investment Bank, London. She was a Senior Investment Officer at the African Development Bank and later worked for a private equity firm in New York.

As a Senior Investment Adviser to the minister, Osakwe serves as the point person for domestic and foreign investors with an interest in the Nigerian agricultural sector.

“This pioneering programme by The Tony Elumelu Foundation will be key in ensuring the catalytic growth of the agricultural industry. The Senior Investment Advisor will help to build and strengthen the capacity for mobilizing investments within the Ministry of Agriculture in our drive to make agriculture more productive, efficient and competitive,” says Dr Adesina.

Tony Elumelu

Now six months into her two-year secondment at the ministry, Osakwe has lived up to this expectation.

“My job entails being the eyes, ears of the minister when it comes to anything to do with investment in agriculture,” she says, “specifically in agric-business and with regards to the private sector. I’m the interface for the private sector – structuring deals to the extent possible from a federal government standpoint and meeting with them, handholding, making them feel comfortable about the policies we’re undertaking and the things we’re doing to ensure we can attract local and international private investors and operators into the sector.”

In the last six months, Osakwe has facilitated high-level negotiations with private investors, large agric-businesses, global firms and local business heavyweights such as Cargill, Syngenta, Nestle, Coca Cola, Teragro from the Transcorp Group and Flour Mills of Nigeria.

Last January, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, she organised an investment session with Cargill which is planning a huge investment in Nigeria.

In addition to liaising with big agric-firms, tapping on her private equity background, she is spearheading engagements with investment firms, banks, financial institutions, and policy institutions that are looking at working with the ministry.

“Those are the sorts of meetings I have on a daily basis. It’s really speaking with them, presenting the agenda to them, asking questions with regards to how they can engage in the country, finding out how we as a government can incentivise them through our policies, through our actions.”

Osakwe says her role has given confidence to private sector investors that the government is serious about this private sector-led transformation in the agriculture sector.

“We are showing private investors that the agriculture transformation agenda in Nigeria really is working. [The government] are serious about it, for them to attract somebody of the right background to deal with this issue, because they want it to be private sector-led so they’re putting their money where their mouth is. I speak their language. I can really engage with [the investors]; we worked in similar institutions; we went to similar schools. So I think, in that regard, when it comes to the finance bit — because we’re even engaging with Heirs Holdings, with UBA Capital and all these firms — I think that has given a credible voice to the agricultural transformation and what the minster is leading in the agricultural sector.”

She is leveraging on the confidence she has instilled on investors and is taking charge in leading them through the various investment opportunities in the agriculture sector.

“[I’m] getting them excited about what’s happening in Nigeria, showing them the investment opportunities because many people may want to do something but they just don’t know where to start or what we do. What are the catchy investment opportunities? Should I do aquaculture? Should I do cassava? Should I do rice? Should I do horticulture and set up a greenhouse with tomatoes?

“Part of my job is to really make those investment opportunities tangible so that you can really take it to someone and say, ‘you have the money, we have the opportunities — let’s get this done.'”

Her efforts are beginning to yield fruit. She has already helped convince undecided investors in multi-million dollar deals to completely throw their hats in. For instance, she’s actively engaged in the ministry’s Staple Crop Processing Zones initiative. Her particular task here is helping to free up land for investors.

“It can cost as much as a thousand dollars per hectare to clear land. You may have land but to make it agriculturally productive is expensive. For private sector investors, this is a big hindrance. The ministry’s initiative means that we can share the cost of helping to clear land, so that we can assist investors to get the smallholding farmers planting again on their land. I wrote the memo for us to have an emergence intervention fund where the government is putting about a billion naira to clear land in about 17 states.”

Osakwe says her job in the Agriculture Ministry is in line with one of the fundamental tenets of President Goodluck Jonathan’s Transformation Agenda:

“Agriculture is a main component of our non-oil exports, which is the fastest growing component of our GDP. From over 40% of our GDP in 2005, the oil sector’s share of the economy has come down to about 23%. So what are we doing? We need to diversify. Today every country -Ghana, Uganda – is finding oil. We cannot rest on that base and the very obvious way for us to continue the growth rate we’ve been seeing in Nigeria, for us to provide employment, for us to transform Nigeria, is to go back to the days when agriculture accounted for the majority of our economy. My belief is that everything we’re doing today is going in that direction.”

Osakwe believes that, with this fellowship programme, The Tony Elumelu Foundation has claimed a leadership role in the policy space, through the innovative work it is doing with the public sector through private sector participants.

“The foundation is very interesting in terms of being a leader in this space, in general, for trying to push this entrepreneurial vision for Africa and showing that the private sector can lead and cause change in society. It’s about being able to promote a new cadre of young leaders who are entrepreneurial. Transformation doesn’t have to start at the political level. I think that’s fantastic.”

More than anything, Ada says the access and connection that the fellowship provides is what she cherishes the most.

“The Foundation has been great. With my job, I’m able to build the right connections for transformational work. I love the fact that I just have access to such an incredible group of people when I need the support, when I need the guidance. I work with a fantastic group of people.”