Elliot Faminu

The yummy white mustache I have a bet that I am almost certain I would win: the majority of Lagosians have never tasted fresh cow milk. That thought was one of the starting points when we began working on the dairy project in Lagos. We wanted to change a reality that most of us had never really questioned: that in a city where milk is consumed every day, access to fresh milk is almost non-existent. Most of us grew up on powdered milk, evaporated milk and condensed milk, and that was perfectly normal. You opened a tin, tore a sachet, added water where required, and got on with your milk-required meal – cereal, pap, oats porridge etc. Fresh milk belonged more to foreign films and advertisements, usually accompanied by that unmistakable white mustache left behind after a good gulp. Our objective from the beginning was to see whether we could change that. Our experience is not necessarily the African experience either. In Kenya, for instance, fresh liquid milk has long been part of everyday food culture, so the idea that fresh milk should feel unfamiliar in a major African city like Lagos is unpalatable. At Badagry, dairy being run by Origin farms is currently working towards producing about 1,500 litres of fresh milk every week from the Ayrshire cows. The milk is processed and bottled with trials being done, moving samples under cold-chain conditions to Lagos Island and Ikeja, and delivering them to select stakeholders for feedback. It is one thing to produce milk on a farm and another to get it into a refrigerator several kilometres away in the same condition in which it left the dairy. The milk has to be processed and bottled, tested in a lab, kept at the right temperature and moved from Badagry into the city, and this is being done now on a relatively small scale before moving into the much larger operation planned for Epe. The Lagos dairy farm and cattle feedlot in Epe sits on 250 hectares and is where the commercial scale of the dairy programme will eventually take place, with the land and infrastructure for the cattle, feed production and the wider livestock operation. Badagry and Epe therefore have different roles within the same plan: Badagry allows private sector to produce, test and understand the market now, while Epe is being developed for the volumes that a commercial operation will require. The market is also an interesting one because we are not introducing Lagosians to milk; we are only giving access to a different form of something they have consumed all their lives. Fresh milk tastes different, has to remain refrigerated and has a much shorter shelf life than the milk most of us grew up with. This is part of why we are sending out samples now. We want people to taste it and tell us what they think before it gets anywhere near a supermarket shelf. We have some distance to go before locally produced fresh milk becomes a regular sight in refrigerators across Lagos, but that is exactly the narrative we set out to change: that fresh milk is something Lagosians consume elsewhere, see in films or associate with other markets, rather than something that can be produced here and become part of everyday life here. On a lighter note, I can’t wait to have a white mustache everyday.

Abi_Olusanya's tweet photo. The yummy white mustache

I have a bet that I am almost certain I would win: the majority of Lagosians have never tasted fresh cow milk. That thought was one of the starting points when we began working on the dairy project in Lagos. We wanted to change a reality that most of us had never really questioned: that in a city where milk is consumed every day, access to fresh milk is almost non-existent.

Most of us grew up on powdered milk, evaporated milk and condensed milk, and that was perfectly normal. You opened a tin, tore a sachet, added water where required, and got on with your milk-required meal – cereal, pap, oats porridge etc. Fresh milk belonged more to foreign films and advertisements, usually accompanied by that unmistakable white mustache left behind after a good gulp. Our objective from the beginning was to see whether we could change that.

Our experience is not necessarily the African experience either. In Kenya, for instance, fresh liquid milk has long been part of everyday food culture, so the idea that fresh milk should feel unfamiliar in a major African city like Lagos is unpalatable.

At Badagry, dairy being run by Origin farms is currently working towards producing about 1,500 litres of fresh milk every week from the Ayrshire cows. The milk is processed and bottled with trials being done, moving samples under cold-chain conditions to Lagos Island and Ikeja, and delivering them to select stakeholders for feedback.

It is one thing to produce milk on a farm and another to get it into a refrigerator several kilometres away in the same condition in which it left the dairy. The milk has to be processed and bottled, tested in a lab, kept at the right temperature and moved from Badagry into the city, and this is being done now on a relatively small scale before moving into the much larger operation planned for Epe.

The Lagos dairy farm and cattle feedlot in Epe sits on 250 hectares and is where the commercial scale of the dairy programme will eventually take place, with the land and infrastructure for the cattle, feed production and the wider livestock operation. Badagry and Epe therefore have different roles within the same plan: Badagry allows private sector to produce, test and understand the market now, while Epe is being developed for the volumes that a commercial operation will require.

The market is also an interesting one because we are not introducing Lagosians to milk; we are only giving access to a different form of something they have consumed all their lives. Fresh milk tastes different, has to remain refrigerated and has a much shorter shelf life than the milk most of us grew up with. This is part of why we are sending out samples now. We want people to taste it and tell us what they think before it gets anywhere near a supermarket shelf.

We have some distance to go before locally produced fresh milk becomes a regular sight in refrigerators across Lagos, but that is exactly the narrative we set out to change: that fresh milk is something Lagosians consume elsewhere, see in films or associate with other markets, rather than something that can be produced here and become part of everyday life here.

On a lighter note, I can’t wait to have a white mustache everyday.

218

Elliot Faminu @efaminu

18 days ago

@Abi_Olusanya Well said, HC @Abi_Olusanya. Simple, low-hanging-fruit solutions are often what smallholders request.

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Elliot Faminu @efaminu

about 1 month ago

Let your passion pay your pension https://t.co/ZkWMXQwmT7

Elliot Faminu @efaminu

about 1 month ago

@Abi_Olusanya You previously touched on trust, and that really is the anchor issue. Without deep-rooted trust across supply networks and public delivery channels, scaling food affordability solutions will always hit a bottleneck.

Elliot Faminu @efaminu

about 1 month ago

@Abi_Olusanya Spot on, Honourable Commissioner. Having led at an Ounje Eko market location, I watched women make those exact "life decisions" at trader stalls. The intervention proved that targeted affordability measures work - hence the overwhelming call from residents for it to continue.

efaminu retweeted

Abisola Olusanya | The Lagos Food Architect

@Abi_Olusanya

about 1 month ago

The Crisis of Trust There are certain habits that we Nigerians have developed over time without ever consciously deciding to adopt them. We ask for payment before delivery, insist on seeing evidence that a transfer has been received even after it has left our account, keep screenshots of transactions long after they have been completed, call to confirm that someone has set out on a journey despite receiving a message moments earlier, and quietly build contingencies into our plans because experience has taught us that things do not always unfold as they should. These behaviours have become so deeply woven into everyday life that they rarely strike us as unusual. They simply feel like common sense. What is remarkable, however, is that very few of these habits are born out of dishonesty. They are, more often than not, the product of experience. They reflect years of navigating an environment in which promises are occasionally overtaken by circumstances, policies change with little warning, payments arrive later than expected, systems fail without explanation and certainty is often something individuals must create for themselves rather than something provided by the institutions around them. In such an environment, caution gradually begins to resemble wisdom, and what started as an adaptation slowly hardens into culture. The difficulty is that while these individual decisions are entirely rational, they rarely remain individual for very long. They accumulate quietly across society until they begin to shape the way an entire economy functions. Businesses demand larger deposits because they are uncertain about tomorrow's costs, suppliers adjust prices to protect themselves against future losses, financial institutions price risk more aggressively, organizations introduce additional layers of approval to guard against failure, and households increasingly make purchasing decisions based not only on what they need today but on what they fear tomorrow might bring. None of these responses is unreasonable when viewed in isolation, yet together they create an environment in which uncertainty acquires a price, and everyone, knowingly or otherwise, contributes something towards paying it. I have often wondered whether we sufficiently acknowledge the role this plays in our national conversation about the cost of living. We understandably attribute rising prices to inflation, exchange rate volatility, energy costs, insecurity and inadequate infrastructure, all of which exert enormous influence over the economy. Yet beneath these visible pressures lies another force that is seldom discussed, not because it is insignificant but because it is difficult to measure. It is the quiet cost of distrust, expressed not through dramatic events but through millions of ordinary decisions made every day by people trying, quite sensibly, to protect themselves from uncertainty. Unlike inflation, distrust does not appear in official statistics, and unlike unemployment, it is rarely debated in economic reports. It leaves no single indicator by which its effects can be tracked, yet its presence is felt almost everywhere. It slows decisions that might otherwise have been made quickly, discourages investments that would have flourished under greater certainty and encourages people to devote time, energy and resources towards managing risk rather than creating value. Over time, the cumulative effect becomes difficult to ignore because what began as a series of sensible individual precautions gradually evolves into a collective burden that weighs upon everyone. The longer I have reflected on this, the more convinced I have become that trust is perhaps one of the most undervalued forms of national infrastructure. Roads connect places, electricity powers industries and telecommunications connect people, but trust performs an equally important function by connecting expectations. It allows strangers to cooperate, enables institutions to function beyond the strength of individual personalities and creates the confidence that agreements reached today will still hold meaning tomorrow. Prosperity, in many respects, depends as much upon this invisible infrastructure as it does upon the physical structures we are able to see. It took me some time to realize where this truth revealed itself most clearly - it was in food. Working across agriculture and food systems has a curious way of changing how one sees the world. What appears to the consumer as a simple purchase is, in reality, the final chapter of a remarkably intricate story involving people who will never meet, never speak and may never even know of one another's existence. Long before a basket of tomatoes arrives in a Lagos market, decisions have already been taken across farms, warehouses, financial institutions, transport networks, processing facilities and retail outlets, each based on the expectation that someone else, somewhere further along the chain, will do exactly what the system requires of them. It is this quiet confidence, repeated thousands of times every day by people connected only through the journey of food, that allows millions of individual decisions to come together as though they were part of a single, carefully orchestrated design. Seen from this perspective, food systems are sustained by much more than production alone. They are sustained by relationships, by reliability and by the confidence that allows thousands of independent decisions to align towards a common outcome. Where that confidence is strong, systems become more efficient because participants spend less time protecting themselves from one another and more time creating value together. Where it is weak, every participant instinctively builds an additional layer of protection into the way they work, and before long those protective measures begin to appear in the form of higher transport costs, wider trading margins, more cautious lending, delayed investments and ultimately higher food prices. This explains why discussions about food security often leave me feeling that something important has been omitted. We rightly devote enormous attention to increasing production, improving seeds, expanding irrigation and supporting farmers, but we devote far less attention to strengthening the invisible relationships that allow these investments to translate into affordable food for ordinary people. A food system, after all, is not merely a collection of farms, markets and warehouses. It is a network of relationships, and like every relationship, its strength depends not only on capacity but also on confidence. As I have thought more deeply about this, I have begun to wonder whether the cost of food in Nigeria tells us something far greater than the story of agriculture. Ultimately, it tells us something about ourselves. Every additional margin added to guard against uncertainty, every unnecessary delay caused by verification, every duplicated process introduced because confidence has weakened and every opportunity postponed until conditions feel safer is quietly reflected in the prices we eventually pay. The journey from farm to table may therefore reveal more than the efficiency of a supply chain; it may reveal the health of the invisible bonds that hold a society together. A society that struggles to trust inevitably becomes a more expensive place in which to live because every participant learns to build uncertainty into the price of doing business, and those individual calculations, entirely rational in themselves, eventually become a collective cost that no one intended but everyone is left to bear. The true crisis we face is not merely one of inflation or infrastructure, important as both undoubtedly are, but a crisis of trust whose consequences extend far beyond our relationships and find their way, quietly and persistently, into the price of almost everything, including the food that ultimately reaches our tables.

Abi_Olusanya's tweet photo. The Crisis of Trust

There are certain habits that we Nigerians have developed over time without ever consciously deciding to adopt them. We ask for payment before delivery, insist on seeing evidence that a transfer has been received even after it has left our account, keep screenshots of transactions long after they have been completed, call to confirm that someone has set out on a journey despite receiving a message moments earlier, and quietly build contingencies into our plans because experience has taught us that things do not always unfold as they should. These behaviours have become so deeply woven into everyday life that they rarely strike us as unusual. They simply feel like common sense.

What is remarkable, however, is that very few of these habits are born out of dishonesty. They are, more often than not, the product of experience. They reflect years of navigating an environment in which promises are occasionally overtaken by circumstances, policies change with little warning, payments arrive later than expected, systems fail without explanation and certainty is often something individuals must create for themselves rather than something provided by the institutions around them. In such an environment, caution gradually begins to resemble wisdom, and what started as an adaptation slowly hardens into culture.

The difficulty is that while these individual decisions are entirely rational, they rarely remain individual for very long. They accumulate quietly across society until they begin to shape the way an entire economy functions. Businesses demand larger deposits because they are uncertain about tomorrow's costs, suppliers adjust prices to protect themselves against future losses, financial institutions price risk more aggressively, organizations introduce additional layers of approval to guard against failure, and households increasingly make purchasing decisions based not only on what they need today but on what they fear tomorrow might bring. None of these responses is unreasonable when viewed in isolation, yet together they create an environment in which uncertainty acquires a price, and everyone, knowingly or otherwise, contributes something towards paying it.

I have often wondered whether we sufficiently acknowledge the role this plays in our national conversation about the cost of living. We understandably attribute rising prices to inflation, exchange rate volatility, energy costs, insecurity and inadequate infrastructure, all of which exert enormous influence over the economy. Yet beneath these visible pressures lies another force that is seldom discussed, not because it is insignificant but because it is difficult to measure. It is the quiet cost of distrust, expressed not through dramatic events but through millions of ordinary decisions made every day by people trying, quite sensibly, to protect themselves from uncertainty.

Unlike inflation, distrust does not appear in official statistics, and unlike unemployment, it is rarely debated in economic reports. It leaves no single indicator by which its effects can be tracked, yet its presence is felt almost everywhere. It slows decisions that might otherwise have been made quickly, discourages investments that would have flourished under greater certainty and encourages people to devote time, energy and resources towards managing risk rather than creating value. Over time, the cumulative effect becomes difficult to ignore because what began as a series of sensible individual precautions gradually evolves into a collective burden that weighs upon everyone.

The longer I have reflected on this, the more convinced I have become that trust is perhaps one of the most undervalued forms of national infrastructure. Roads connect places, electricity powers industries and telecommunications connect people, but trust performs an equally important function by connecting expectations. It allows strangers to cooperate, enables institutions to function beyond the strength of individual personalities and creates the confidence that agreements reached today will still hold meaning tomorrow. Prosperity, in many respects, depends as much upon this invisible infrastructure as it does upon the physical structures we are able to see.

It took me some time to realize where this truth revealed itself most clearly - it was in food.

Working across agriculture and food systems has a curious way of changing how one sees the world. What appears to the consumer as a simple purchase is, in reality, the final chapter of a remarkably intricate story involving people who will never meet, never speak and may never even know of one another's existence. Long before a basket of tomatoes arrives in a Lagos market, decisions have already been taken across farms, warehouses, financial institutions, transport networks, processing facilities and retail outlets, each based on the expectation that someone else, somewhere further along the chain, will do exactly what the system requires of them. It is this quiet confidence, repeated thousands of times every day by people connected only through the journey of food, that allows millions of individual decisions to come together as though they were part of a single, carefully orchestrated design.

Seen from this perspective, food systems are sustained by much more than production alone. They are sustained by relationships, by reliability and by the confidence that allows thousands of independent decisions to align towards a common outcome. Where that confidence is strong, systems become more efficient because participants spend less time protecting themselves from one another and more time creating value together. Where it is weak, every participant instinctively builds an additional layer of protection into the way they work, and before long those protective measures begin to appear in the form of higher transport costs, wider trading margins, more cautious lending, delayed investments and ultimately higher food prices.

This explains why discussions about food security often leave me feeling that something important has been omitted. We rightly devote enormous attention to increasing production, improving seeds, expanding irrigation and supporting farmers, but we devote far less attention to strengthening the invisible relationships that allow these investments to translate into affordable food for ordinary people. A food system, after all, is not merely a collection of farms, markets and warehouses. It is a network of relationships, and like every relationship, its strength depends not only on capacity but also on confidence.

As I have thought more deeply about this, I have begun to wonder whether the cost of food in Nigeria tells us something far greater than the story of agriculture. Ultimately, it tells us something about ourselves. Every additional margin added to guard against uncertainty, every unnecessary delay caused by verification, every duplicated process introduced because confidence has weakened and every opportunity postponed until conditions feel safer is quietly reflected in the prices we eventually pay. The journey from farm to table may therefore reveal more than the efficiency of a supply chain; it may reveal the health of the invisible bonds that hold a society together.

A society that struggles to trust inevitably becomes a more expensive place in which to live because every participant learns to build uncertainty into the price of doing business, and those individual calculations, entirely rational in themselves, eventually become a collective cost that no one intended but everyone is left to bear.

The true crisis we face is not merely one of inflation or infrastructure, important as both undoubtedly are, but a crisis of trust whose consequences extend far beyond our relationships and find their way, quietly and persistently, into the price of almost everything, including the food that ultimately reaches our tables.

Elliot Faminu @efaminu

2 months ago

@Abi_Olusanya Succinctly illustrated, ma'am. This includes the grassroots smallholders.

efaminu retweeted

Lagos State Agricultural Development Authority @LagosStateADA

3 months ago

Recent trends show rising crop production, but bottlenecks remain (e.g., ₦2B lost by tomato farmers last year due to weak logistics). We are inviting actionable, solution-driven articles from farmers, agripreneurs, policymakers, engineers. #LagosFarmerMagazine

LagosStateADA's tweet photo. Recent trends show rising crop production, but bottlenecks remain (e.g., ₦2B lost by tomato farmers last year due to weak logistics). We are inviting actionable, solution-driven articles from farmers, agripreneurs, policymakers, engineers.

#LagosFarmerMagazine https://t.co/3Si9ySuoh2

Elliot Faminu @efaminu

3 months ago

@akinwale_cfi I saw, and I learnt 😊

115

efaminu retweeted

Lagos State Agricultural Development Authority @LagosStateADA

4 months ago

'Lagos Farmer' is a production of #LSADA, delivering agricultural insights & updates on @lagosstategov's food security policies. Every Friday at 4:30 PM on Lagos Traffic Radio 96.1 FM. Subscribe: https://t.co/bZmVcBvElg #AGreaterLagosRising