IF YOU STAND at the dusty junction of Kofar Nassarawa in Kano today, there is very little to remind you that you are walking on sacred economic ground.
Where young men now kick a worn leather ball across an improvised football field, towering structures made of thousands of tightly packed jute sacks once reached into the West African sky. They were the famous Kano Groundnut Pyramids monuments of agricultural wealth so immense that they were stamped onto national postage stamps and marvelled at by international traders as a symbol of African economic self-reliance.
Each pyramid, pioneered by legendary merchant Alhassan Dantata in the early 20th century, could contain up to 15,000 full sacks of peanuts. By the late 1960s, Nigeria was the undisputed global titan of groundnuts, supplying over 40% of West Africa’s total output and earning millions in hard foreign exchange without touching a single drop of crude oil.
Today, the pyramids are ghosts. The land has been paved over, subdivided, or turned into recreational grounds. And in a tragic economic irony, a country that once fed the world now struggles to feed itself.
How did an agrarian superpower, whose regional engines were powered by Northern groundnuts, Western cocoa, and Eastern palm oil, transform into a nation spending trillions of naira annually to import basic food staples?
The Siren Song of the Black Gold
The downfall of Nigeria’s agricultural hegemony was not an accident; it was a deliberate, slow-motion abandonment.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, as commercial crude oil began gushing from the Niger Delta, a classic economic disease struck the nation: the “Dutch Disease”. Easy petrodollars flooded the federal coffers. Overnight, the tedious, back-breaking work of tilling the soil, maintaining irrigation channels, and supporting local farming cooperatives lost its appeal to the ruling class.
Prominent peanut merchants, once the aggregators of rural wealth, traded their farm network ledgers for lucrative government oil and construction contracts. Federal attention shifted from rural extension workers to oil rigs.
Then came nature’s blow, and the state’s refusal to buffer it. In 1975, a devastating outbreak of the Rosette virus, carried by aphid pests during a severe drought spell, wiped out over 700,000 hectares of groundnut farms across the North. In a functional agricultural economy, the government would have deployed emergency research grants, subsidized disease-resistant seeds, and subsidized the affected farmers. Instead, the state, drunk on oil revenues, simply looked away. Farmers lost confidence, abandoned the crop, or migrated to urban centers to push wheelbarrows and work as security guards.
The pyramids didn’t just fall; they were starved out of existence.
The Structural Funeral
The final nail in the coffin of Nigeria’s agrarian dominance came in the 1980s with the introduction of the Structural Adjustment Program (SAP). Under pressure from international financial institutions, the government dismantled the commodity marketing boards that had historically guaranteed stable prices and ready markets for smallholder farmers.
Left at the mercy of volatile market forces, poor road infrastructure, zero cold-storage systems, and non-existent credit facilities, the Nigerian farmer was effectively abandoned.
The statistics that followed are heartbreaking:
Palm Oil: In the 1960s, Nigeria accounted for over 40% of global palm oil production. Today, Nigeria is a net importer of palm oil, buying millions of metric tons from Malaysia—a nation that originally collected its seedling samples from West Africa.
Groundnut: From exporting over 1.6 million metric tonnes at its peak in 1973, Nigeria lost its dominant spot in the global export market, turning groundnut from a foreign-exchange earner into a domestic struggle.
Food Import Dependency: Nigeria now spends over ₦1 trillion annually importing basic food items like wheat, rice, sugar, and fish—commodities that its own soil could easily produce.
The Human Cost: From Independence to Indigence
The tragedy of this collapse is not found in macroeconomic charts; it is found in the everyday lives of ordinary citizens.
When the groundnut pyramids stood tall in Kano and Jigawa, agriculture provided dignified, multi-generational employment. It funded the free education policies of the Western region, built the infrastructure of the Northern region, and sustained rural economies without a dime of central oil allocations.
Today, the neglect of the agrarian economy has created a massive, unemployed rural youth population—a vulnerability that has been weaponized by insecurity, banditry, and extremist groups across the country. A young man who cannot earn a living from his father’s groundnut or cotton farm becomes easy prey for criminal syndicates offering a gun and a share of ransom money.
Beyond Nostalgia: The Path Back to the Soil
Every few years, politicians visit Kano, stand on a podium, and promise to “bring back the groundnut pyramids.” But stacking bags of groundnuts into pyramids in the 21st century is a flawed goal. The pyramids were, after all, merely an outdoor storage method born out of a lack of modern warehousing.
What Nigeria needs to resurrect is not the physical pyramids, but the agrarian ecosystem that built them:
Agro-Processing over Raw Export: Nigeria must move beyond selling raw groundnuts or cocoa beans. Real wealth lies in processing, converting groundnuts into domestic vegetable oils, industrial pastes, and animal feed locally.
Security in the Food Belts: No farmer can return to the field while bandits lurk in the bushes. Restoring rural security is the single most urgent agricultural policy required today.
Targeted Subsidies and Technology: Modern farming requires mechanized equipment, climate-resilient seed varieties, and direct access to low-interest credit for smallholders, not political hand-outs disguised as empowerment.
The story of the groundnut pyramids is a cautionary tale of what happens when a nation trades sustainable production for quick, unearned wealth. Crude oil gave Nigeria temporary riches, but it stole its economic soul.
Until we realize that the true gold of Nigeria lies not underneath the soil of the Niger Delta, but on the top six inches of arable land across the North, West, and East, we will continue to starve in the midst of plenty. It is time to clear the football fields, honor our agrarian history, and get back to work
The Writer, Abdulazeez Toheeb Olawale is a freelance journalist, he can be reach
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