Parastatals under Agric Ministry urged to Support NAIC

Parastatals under the Federal Ministry of Agriculture have been asked to give necessary support to the Nigerian Agricultural Insurance Corporation (NAIC), the agricultural risks insurer owned by the federal government to enable it deliver on its mandate.

The Chairman of the company, Mrs. Chioma Ohakim, made the plea during inauguration of the company’s board in Abuja recently. According to her, the support for NAIC would go a long way to attaining the agricultural transformation agenda of the federal government.

She tasked other members of NAIC board to justify their appointments saying “the spirit of team work and self sacrifice should be imbibed by all of us, while the culture of business as usual must be jettisoned.”

Ohakim assured government and other stakeholders in the company that the new board would leave a lasting legacy at the end of the day. “We are all determined to leave a lasting legacy for posterity, so that we scale-up the operations and service delivery of all the agencies of government,” she said.

She also called on NAIC staff and management to team up with the new board towards forging ahead, saying “the board would go the extra-mile with the view to ensuring and sustaining government support to enable NAIC to operate optimally for the benefit of farmers nationwide.”

The chairman also charged the management of NAIC to ensure that all categories of farmers, especially the small farm holders are carried along by NAIC, saying extension services should be regularly organised to up-date farmers with modern farming techniques and how to maximising farm yields.

Meanwhile, the Managing Director of NAIC, Mr. Tijjani Garba, has explained that employees in the company had great expectations from the board in view of the profile of members of the new board.
He assured the board members that employees in the organisation were ready to support them even as they have already keyed into the federal government transformation agenda of making food available to Nigerians.

According to him, the company has re-engineered its operations towards up-scaling NAIC service delivery to farmers, especially in the areas of prompt claims payment and extension services to farmers across the country.

“The corporation has recently been reengineered to verify and pay the high volume of claims requests from all crops and livestock destroyed as a result of last year’s flood and any other disaster,” Garba said.

Before now, NAIC’s management reassured existing and potential investors in the country’s agricultural sector of its commitment to protecting and growing their investments.

The insurer also symphatised with investors whose farms and crops were ravaged by flood, drought, pest invasion and pestilences across the country, assuring them that the corporation would go out of its way to ensure that they smile again to the banks.

The agricultural risks specialist insurer said the reengineering of its products and processes is to ensure that farmers who are involved in any form of insured losses are restored without unnecessary delays.

De Edge Farms