By Cletus Adole

“A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way”. —John Maxwell

The recent announcement that Mr Aliyu Abdulhameed, MD/CEO of the Nigerian Incentive-Based Risk Sharing System for Agricultural Lending (NIRSAL PLC), is a winner of the prestigious Global Award of the CEO Today Magazine for 2021 will not surprise anyone familiar with the contributions which the man and the organization he leads are have made to the transformation of Nigerian agriculture and agribusiness over the past five years.

Mr Aliyu Abdulhameed, MD/CEO, NIRSAL PLC

As a result of the dynamic and innovative leadership of NIRSAL PLC under Abdulhameed’s watch, the young institution which was barely a blip on the radar five years ago has become a robust and respected presence with solid and measurable accomplishments making real impact at various levels of the agro-economy.

According to CEO Today, Abdulhameed, a highly experienced agricultural economist with over 30 years hands-on experience in agricultural value chains and markets in sub-Sahara Africa is deserving of recognition on account of the innovations and accomplishments that NIRSAL PLC has notched up under his leadership.

The evidence of the impact he is making is unimpeachable, starting from NIRSAL PLC’s core mandate of making agriculture more attractive to banks and encouraging more investment in the sector.

Among NIRSAL’s achievements under Abdulhameed’s watch is the facilitation of over $550 million to various actors across Agricultural Value Chains for mechanization activities, input distribution, and the production, processing, trading and marketing of agricultural commodities.

Related to this, commercial banks have pledged to provide an additional $500 million to fund agriculture in the short to medium-term based on their faith in NIRSAL PLC’s Credit Risk Guarantee (CRG) and structured Agro Geo-Cooperatives®.

It is an indication that financiers are growing more and more confident in lending to agriculture. This claim is supported by the remarkable growth in the rate of bank lending to agriculture, from 1.4% pre-NIRSAL to 4.8 per cent as of Q3 2020.

The CEO Today Magazine Award has been won by a select group of outstanding achievers on different continents over the years. It recognizes “strong and innovative leadership among the most inspiring CEOs and business leaders” across the world.

The highly regarded platform honours the most-respected companies and their C-Level executives who lead the way for others on a global stage.

According to the magazine, the 2021 awards are special because the CEOs selected, delivered despite the Coronavirus pandemic.

The 2021 award winners come from the academia, tech, e-commerce, public administration and more from several countries including the UAE, Germany, USA, Sweden, Bulgaria and China. The include:

Dr Abdullatif Al Shamsi, President and CEO of the Higher Colleges of Technology, the largest higher institution in the United Arab Emirates with 23,000 students across 16 campuses;

Michael Lampel, CEO and Founder of Qooper Media, an accomplished investor and business development expert based in south west Germany;

Philip Weiser, CEO of AnyDesk, an innovative remote solutions company in Germany which has witnessed impressive growth while disrupting the remote software solutions industry since the pandemic

As those who know him can attest, Abdulhameed is the kind of leader who is comfortable at all points of the leadership spectrum.

He is both a visionary passionate both about the big issues at the critical junction of agriculture and agribusiness as well as a hands-on technocrat who likes to immerse himself in the nitty-gritty details of small scale farming.

This passion shines through whether he is on the podium at a conference, marshaling his troops in the office to reach targets or on a field trip to inspect an agricultural project supported by NIRSAL PLC.

Always bustling with energy and big ideas, he is always focused on one priority whether he is discussing the latest technologies and techniques in global agriculture or the best methods to organize the millions of poor farmers for higher productivity: better results.

The award for innovative leadership is therefore well deserved because, at NIRSAL PLC, Abdulhameed is showcasing skills and experience spanning across a wide range of areas including, agricultural value chain development, agricultural value chain finance, research and innovation, extension services, agribusiness development, product marketing, strategy, project management as well as agricultural policy analysis and advocacy.

The passionate agribusiness manager and thought leader is fond of saying that NIRSAL PLC has “innovation in its DNA”. This is clear from the raft of innovations he is leading in the organization such as the creation of NIRSAL Agro Geo-Cooperative® (AGC) scheme, an ambitious, paradigmatic plan targeted at revolutionizing agricultural production and productivity in the country.

The scheme is structuring farmers and aggregating their farmlands into contiguous stretches of 250 hectares each and link them with training, inputs, mechanization, financing and produce buyers.

AGC will build on the increasing benefits of NIRSAL initiatives that are making a real difference in creating opportunities for farmers. So far, through NIRSAL’s facilitation, more than 370,000 direct jobs have been created and an estimated 1.8 million indirect jobs in the pre-upstream, upstream, midstream and downstream segments of the agricultural value chain, specifically in the areas of mechanization, input supply, primary production and processing.

Other innovations being progressed under Abdulhameed’s watch include the creation and mapping of Agricultural Commodity Ecological Areas (ACEAs); the development of the Mapping to Markets (M2M) strategy; the development of innovative index-based agricultural insurance products; the introduction of comprehensive field monitoring by remote sensing satellite systems and granular validation by UAS platforms; and the development of the Secured Agricultural Commodity Transport & Storage Corridor (SATS-C) model to address logistical inefficiencies in the agricultural value chain in Nigeria.

This is not the first significant recognition of NIRSAL under Abdulhameed’s leadership. The institution also won the Outstanding Development Finance Institution Award of the Annual BusinessDay Banks’ And Other Financial institutions (BAFI) Awards back to back in 2018 and 2019. BAFI recognizes and celebrates outstanding performance in Nigeria’s financial services industry including those that have brought revolutionary benefits to the sector.

The CEO Today award confirms the potent blend of quality and passion that defines this remarkable man and leader.

Perhaps more important, it is a credit to the unique institution he leads and the great difference that he, along with his hardworking team are making in the executive suites of the financial sector and fields of Nigeria’s agriculture and agribusiness.

*Cletus Adole is a policy analyst based in Abuja.