A Hungry Man, A Hungry Nation.

Paul grew up in Cameroun with his aged father, he was the only child of his mother the second wife of the great cocoa farmer. He was an innocent young boy who follow after the footstep of his father, Mazi Maxwell. Mazi had married Obiageli when he was younger and together they had two children. A boy, Ifeanyi, and his sister Marcelina. Ifeanyi died in one of his trips back to Nigeria from Cameroun in the Atlantic ocean when their ship capsized.

Since Marcelina had been married out, mazi whose wife was too old to conceive, had to marry another woman, Paul's mother.

Mazi large cocoa farm is the attraction of many customers from far and near for cocoa seeds. And every year they make good sales of the farm produce. Paul learned all the gimmicks adopted in taking care of the cocoa farm, the seeds, and now to dry them before sales. Traders from Nigeria and other African countries come to buy spices and snails since they were available in large quantities here in Cameroun.

Paul started hunting snails which were popularly referred to as Congo Meat. The easiest way to attract snails out of their hiding place was to spread pineapple peels or ripe papaya under plantain trees. Paul adopted this method and caught a lot of snails for sale to the traders. Before you knew it, he became very rich as he joined other products like melon seeds (Egusi), Ogbono, Ugba (oil bean), and some special leaves like Atama, Uziza, and Ukazi to the number of his products.

His father's farm was large enough to make him relax but he decided to spread his tentacles to another source of income.

One day, a group of journalists came to the farm settlement to carry out a documentary on farm life and how products from the farm can add to the country's Gross National Product. Since most of the farmers are not educated, Paul was asked to represent the other farmers.

The journalists set their cameras and they rolled.

Good morning sir.

Paul replied:

Good morning to you.

Can we meet you.

I am Paul by name, a farmer, and loving it.

Would you like to tell us about your experience as a farmer?

Oh. Yeah.

Farming as you know is a traditional occupation. It is the first job of creation. Everyone is a farmer in one little way. Only that we give it more attention than the other.

I was born into farming and I decided to enlarge my coast in it. If well managed, farming can feed a nation.

Most of us in this farm settlement have children in the university studying one aspect of agriculture or the other. The purpose is to continue this farming business that many people look down to these days.

Our major plea to the government is to provide good road networks, electricity and pipe-borne water so that livestock farming can improve.

The interview ended and the journalist returned to the main city where they had come from. Few days later, investors started looking in to the farm settlement making different treaties to become stakeholders in the farm business.

As we speak, most of the wealth of nations like Belgium, Congo, Cameroun, even the USA made the largest part of their income through farming.

It is so unfortunate that the white-collar job has taken our first occupation from us. Many people depend on the market for the simplest things like vegetable, pepper and the likes. To rear local breed fowls is even going into extinction now.

Any nation that cannot feed her populace has failed. Food security is one of the first cores of coming together as a nation. It is rather too unwise to see that as a nation, we are still importing our major foods that we can turn our many forest to farmlands and begin to export such foods.

Aquatic life in our nation is just lying fallow. We import stockfish whereas we have it in large quantity between Igbokoda in Ondo state to the coast of Lagos. Is that we are too blind to see, or it is a case of a blind dog leading a blind horse?

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