Abakaliki Rice Mill: Ebonyi’s prostrate goldmine

Let me show you something heart-breaking about Abakaliki Rice Mill.

Before I left Abakaliki, I visited the Rice Mill and the condition of the place broke my heart. I had pity on the car we went there with but it wasn’t anything compared to the sadness I felt when I saw the condition of the women that work there. The gate and the road looked like the path to a village shrine. Yet the rice that comes out of that place is the most famous rice in Nigeria.

Let me show you, with numbers, what this government is walking past every day and I’m hoping they will see this and do better.

The Abakaliki Rice Mill has operated since 1967. It’s arguably the largest rice mill in Nigeria, with over 8,000 workers across the value chain. It processes up to 11,000 metric tonnes of rice a month.

Do the arithmetic. 11,000 tonnes a month is 132,000 tonnes a year, or about 2.64 million 50kg bags. This year, a 50kg bag sold for between N65,000 and N80,000. Even at the lowest price, that’s about N171.6 billion worth of rice passing through that one mill every year.

Ebonyi’s entire internally generated revenue in 2025 was N17.18 billion. The rice moving through a mill in that deplorable condition is worth about 10 times everything our government earns on its own.

Back in 2016, the then Minister of Agriculture, Audu Ogbeh, said Ebonyi would one day earn N6 to N7 billion monthly from supplying local rice. Ten years later, that day hasn’t come.

Now, we all know that Nigeria doesn’t produce enough rice. USDA data put Nigeria’s milled rice production at 5.23 million tonnes against consumption of more than 7.6 million tonnes. That’s a gap of about 2.4 million tonnes every year.

To fill it, Nigeria spends an estimated $2 billion a year importing rice. In 2025, the country spent a record N7.65 trillion importing food and beverages.

Think about that. A hungry national market is sending billions of dollars abroad for a product that Ebonyi is famous for producing. If Ebonyi supplied just 10 per cent of that gap, about 237,000 tonnes, it would be selling roughly N308 billion worth of rice a year. That’s 18 times the state’s IGR.

Ebonyi covers 6,400 square kilometres. The Netherlands as a country covers less than 42,000 square kilometres, only about six and half times Ebonyi. Yet it’s the world’s second-largest exporter of agricultural products by value, behind only the United States. In 2025, it exported €137.5 billion in agricultural goods, €88.4 billion of which was produced or processed in the Netherlands.

Now scale that down. If Ebonyi produced just one per cent of what the Netherlands produces per square kilometre, our farm exports would be worth about €135 million a year. At today’s exchange rates, that’s over N200 billion, more than 12 times our IGR.

The Dutch didn’t get there with flyovers. They got there with greenhouses, research, technology and logistics.

Yes, the mill is privately owned by millers and cooperatives. The government’s role? It collects royalties and levies from them.

So the government takes money from the mill. What does the mill get back?

No power. Each cluster of up to 14 machines burns about 109,200 litres of diesel a year, costing N136.5 million.

No safety. Thousands of women work in a permanent haze of rice dust and machine smoke without protective gear. Universities had to run a free outreach for workers with respiratory symptoms. No good road too. I saw it myself.

The Elechi administration built three modern rice mills, at Ikwo, Iboko and Oso Edda. By 2018, Daily Sun reported that two of them had remained idle since installation.

In 2018, Umahi’s government announced three new mills of three tonnes per hour capacity across the three zones. Where are they today? What are they producing?

Around 2019, the state promised to modernise the Abakaliki Rice Mill with new machines, water, good roads and better buildings. What happened to that promise?

The state said it acquired 250,000 hectares of arable land and trained over 540,000 farmers with a N2 billion commercial loan, targeting over 500,000 tonnes of rice. Estimates of actual production since then range from 134,000 tonnes to 260,000 tonnes.

The state acquired a 5.5-megawatt biomass plant from Germany to turn rice husks into electricity. Yet the mill still runs on diesel, and women still sift through husk heaps by hand.

Over N36 billion went into building an airport, and another N17.3 billion went into fixing its runway. That’s N53.3 billion for an airport that has stayed inactive for over 1,200 days since it was commissioned.

The Vanco flyover is now described as a N28.5 billion project.

For comparison, in 2017 a private company built a N10 billion rice mill in Kebbi with a capacity of 100,000 tonnes a year, plus storage for 30,000 tonnes. Prices have risen since then. But even so, the money sunk into one airport and one flyover could have built modern mills, powered the Abakaliki cluster, and paved the farm roads that farmers walk every season.

Instead, we built flyovers on lonely roads, while farmers carry paddy on their heads through mud.

How much has the state collected in levies from the Abakaliki Rice Mill in the last 10 years, and what has been spent on the mill in return?

What happened to the three Elechi-era mills and the three Umahi-era mills? Are they working, and if not, why not? Where is the 5.5-megawatt biomass plant, and why doesn’t it power the mill?

What happened to the 250,000 hectares and the target of 500,000 tonnes of rice?

Why does a state with the most famous rice in Nigeria have a rice mill with such a deplorable condition, but an airport without planes?

Ebonyi isn’t poor because God forgot us. Ebonyi is poor because our leaders keep building things to look at, instead of things that make money.

The government of Francis Ogbonna Nwifuru can turn this around for the good of the people and his government. Otherwise, let us continue to waste the money we do not have on things we do not need.

•Amobi is the founder/host of KAA Truths Podcast

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