I travel home quite often. When I travelled in April for my secondary school reunion event, planting was getting to its peak, but the months of May and June became a revelation with regard to what is achievable with an intentional, well-thought-out policy approach to agriculture development in Enugu State and many parts of Nigeria.
A revolution is taking place in the Nsukka axis of Enugu State. The people arose to a call from nature to take their destinies in their own hands; they took to tomato farming and are making a massive success of it.
Tomato, in this article, might serve as a metaphor for some of the “strange” crops that are thriving commercially in Nsukka now. The people, through self-help and inspired by the desire to survive, began, a few years ago, to experiment with crops like watermelon, cucumber, tomatoes and bell pepper.
Nsukka was much better known for the highly sought-after yellow pepper, more popularly known as ose Nsukka, which grew to commercial heights and shipped to all cities in the country.
Many families trained their children in school from the proceeds of ose Nsukka farming. Those who were looking for routes to raise capital for other businesses, too, for the planting of this variety of pepper, and raised the capital that started them off.
Back in the day, the belief was that tomatoes would not thrive in the area called Nsukka. As a child growing up, my late mother had a small farm by the corner of our modest home in Nsukka. She planted all sorts of vegetables there, from ugu, pepper, ocimum gratissimum (scent leaves), and occasionally tomatoes.
But the tomatoes were merely propagated absent-mindedly, and we picked one or two balls at the best of times each season. I do not recall any time in those days when we ever picked enough to make a pot of stew for our Sunday rice. All attention was on other crops. The pepper flourished, and neighbours came to have their pick when they needed to make a meal. The same was true of the scent leaf plant.
No neighbour was crazy enough to pick any of the tomatoes then, because they were rare. It was categorised as stealing to pick from that one, even though it was growing in the same garden (as we called it then) as the other vegetables.
Our locality was unique. Everybody lived for everybody. You can stroll into your neighbour’s farm and pick stuff such as pepper, bitter leaf, ugu and all sorts of vegetables if the purpose is to cook the food you and your family will eat. You need not ask for permission. Such was the maturity of our communalism.
But any person who harvests another person’s yam, cocoyam, cassava and some of those higher crops is considered a thief and treated as one.
Tomato fell into the higher crop category. You had to be greedy and well off to afford rice, and for you to steal its accompaniment, the people saw this as not driven by hunger, but by other intentions that are not linked to daily bread.
So, the few tomato balls that ripened in my mother’s garden back then were safe. We feared only the birds and a few insects.
Fast forward to a few years ago, when a few people began to experiment with cucumber and watermelon in Nsukka. Before this experiment started, 100 per cent of cucumbers and watermelons consumed in the vast community of Nsukka (comprising seven local government areas) were brought down from the northern parts of the country.
Yes, I will not forget garden eggs. This was one of them, and it is still providing income to the farmers of Nsukka, who connected to the proverb of the people, which says that, “it is the dirty hands that translate to oily mouths”.
Perhaps encouraged by the results from cucumber, garden egg and watermelon planting, the people started the experiment with tomatoes. They sought out improved varieties and those that were adaptable to the weather conditions of Nsukka.
There was a major problem – water. Nsukka area has no irrigation facility to water the crops during the dry months between February and April. A determined people, they dove into it headfirst, daring every risk. Those planting around local streams dug plastic pipes and hoses to their small unit farms, and that was how water was provided. Others bought water reservoir tanks and visited their farms twice each day to manually give their crops water.
Supporting this revolution was another quiet revolution taking place in the area. The hundreds of smallholder poultries and piggeries sprouting all over the area provided some level of organic manure for the hardworking farmers. Graduates who could not secure paid employment started the smallholder poultries and, while profiting from eggs and chicken sales, also earned extra income from the sale of their chicken and pig droppings, organic fertiliser that the new crops needed to thrive.
Fast forward to June 2025, and Nsukka has become a net exporter of tomatoes to many parts of the country. Trucks come daily to ferry Nsukka tomatoes to markets in Abuja, Owerri, Onitsha, Port Harcourt, Enugu, Lagos and other commercial centres.
The farmers are making more money, if I were to paraphrase President Bola Tinubu during his campaign for the presidency of Nigeria, but my people are achieving what they have achieved with no single government input, support or encouragement.
When you visit Nsukka and hear anyone saying “tomato Jos,” know immediately the person is a stranger and unaware that the lingo has changed to “Tomato Nsukka.” This is not a boast. The tomatoes harvested from the soils of Nsukka are beautiful, alluring and healthy enough to instigate the new lingo of tomato Nsukka as a description of pure natural beauty.
The tomato economy in Nsukka has also given rise to what the young people driving this new economy call ego money (tomato money).
Ego tomato is a parody derived from the common lingo, blood money. It suggests that young men who drive good cars, build decent homes and pop expensive drinks at clubs made their money honestly from tomato farming.
These young men and women are making good money from honest work. They commence farming around March to April, and after three months, they begin their harvests, the culmination of which leaves sums ranging from N10 million to N30 million in their bank accounts. This sum is conservative, considering that those who plant larger acreages realise more than the stated numbers.
The tomato economy is empowering families, providing livelihoods to graduates and side hustles for poorly paid civil servants, teachers and traders. Inside the communities, the people have devised clever ways of maximising the value. There are offtakers in many communities, and the love among the people ensures that farmers take their harvests to these offtakers, who save them the time and drudgery of going to the open market, without cheating them – they still pay them the going market rates. Some help the offtakers to grade and package the tomatoes, those who load them in buses and trucks, and these are values that provide income for the people.
The Nsukka tomato economy is huge. It can get bigger if the government has eyes for development. Who would trigger the thinking to make it all season? Who will think of infrastructure that would make this crop roll around the year, irrespective of the seasonal changes?
Developments to make this an easy possibility have started creeping in. I have begun to see people providing training programmes on greenhouse farming and hydroponics. Setting up greenhouse facilities would require some sizeable capital outlay. Here, the feudal state and local governments should step in to enable the people to take advantage of these opportunities and maximise the benefits.
Government should think of how best to deepen the penetration of such opportunities each time they happen. The more the people invest themselves in such opportunities, the more the government gains in terms of taxation, employment generation, security and sundry other aspects of life.
The ose Nsukka economy empowered hundreds of people. But it is plateauing without the maximisation of its full benefits, such as processing and storage. I was in Enugu sometime in 2018, during an exhibition at Okpara Square. Some people came with proposals on the processing and packaging of that unique pepper.
I still recall the then-governor, Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi, instructing me to pick up all their brochures and flyers and complimentary cards to enable further exploration of the opportunity. But that was the last I heard of that project.
The tomato economy is upon us again in Nsukka. It will linger for long if the dexterity of the Nsukka people is an indicator. Next farming season will be bigger, as conversations of the Nsukka diaspora community investing in the new economy are gathering pace.
If this boom happens, then the challenge would be road infrastructure, transportation and processing/storage issues.
That is another challenge the government should deal with. In the quest for attracting investment, this area is important because of its direct impact on the average individual and households.
There is nobody who earns N15 million in five months of work who would leave the rural area for any golden fleece in the urban area. If incentives for all-season planting are provided, the opportunity doubles, enriching rural communities and ensuring that the human resource depletion in our rural communities instantly abates.
Our political leaders should understand that development does not begin and end with built-up areas. Urbanisation is not the same as development. Actions and activities designed to create access to amenities that improve the quality of life, such as financial services, telephony, roads, clean water, security and economic activities, are the true development indicators.
The people didn’t sit on their hands, waiting to be spoon-fed by government. They sought solutions to their economic challenges and were able to propagate crops that were previously thought to be impossible to cultivate in their area, creating a significant commercial opportunity.
Government thus owes them the support to take this further, by planting pipelines that would expose the possible layers of values along the chain to widen the nets of opportunities and bring more people into the safety of the wealth within the universe of the potential values.