Written by Thirty-four Nigerian states applied to join the federal government’s $500 million Sustainable Power and Irrigation for Nigeria project. Seventeen made it through.
The gap matters more than it looks. SPIN, formally inaugurated in Abuja in March by Prof. Joseph Utsev, the Minister of Water Resources and Sanitation, was designed to halt a problem the ministry itself has quantified: roughly 25 percent of newly irrigated farmland in Nigeria disappears every year, lost to siltation, collapsing canal infrastructure, and decades of deferred dam maintenance. The states that failed to qualify are not excluded for lack of need. They are excluded for failing to meet the World Bank’s entry conditions, which require states to pass Water Users Association laws, commit budgetary support to those associations, and provide counterpart funding before a single dollar of the World Bank-backed package reaches their dams or canals.
That bottleneck is the real story here, more than the funding figure itself. A state can have the worst-eroded irrigation infrastructure in the country and still sit outside the programme if its legislature has not passed the right law or its treasury has not allocated the matching funds. Readiness, not need, is currently the gate.
Engr. Ipinlaye Olaiya, the SPIN National Project Coordinator, presented an implementation update at the project’s second Steering Committee meeting, attended by representatives of Plateau, Borno, and Gombe states among others. Plateau’s delegation came through Deputy Governor Josephine Piyo, standing in for Gov. Caleb Muftwang, whose administration AgriAxis has previously reported on over separate measures to curb rural insecurity affecting farming communities in Barkin Ladi.
SPIN builds directly on an earlier programme, the Transforming Irrigation Management in Nigeria project, which rehabilitated about 32,000 hectares of irrigation schemes and reached an estimated 1.7 million people before winding down. The new project’s ambitions go further. Mr. Utsev has set a national target of irrigating 500,000 hectares of farmland and generating 30 gigawatts of sustainable power as part of the broader package, alongside what he described as strengthened resilience against floods and droughts.
Mr. Mathew Verghis, the World Bank’s Country Director for Nigeria, told the steering committee that recent macroeconomic reforms had stabilised the economy enough to support the kind of multi-year infrastructure commitment SPIN requires. He said the World Bank’s new Country Partnership Framework for Nigeria, covering 2026 to 2032, is organised around job creation and water security, and will lean more heavily on state-level engagement and private capital than previous frameworks did.
Mr. Saroj Jha, the World Bank’s Global Director for Water, was blunter about the underlying risk the programme is racing against. He warned that heavy siltation continues to threaten a large number of Nigerian dams, a warning that lands with more weight given how many states still have not cleared the eligibility bar to access the funding meant to address exactly that problem.
The diplomatic dimension adds a forward-looking thread. The UAE Ambassador to Nigeria, Mr. Salem Saeed AlShamsi, met Mr. Utsev in Abuja on June 3 specifically to discuss strengthening cooperation around SPIN, and extended an invitation for the minister to attend a Water Forum in December, co-hosted by the UAE and Senegal. The forum is positioned as a venue for sharing best practice on water access in underserved communities, the same category much of rural irrigated Nigeria falls into.
What happens between now and harvest will say more about SPIN than any steering committee meeting can. Seventeen states have cleared the threshold. Whether they translate that clearance into dredged canals and functioning Water Users Associations before the next planting cycle, or whether the programme stalls the way earlier irrigation interventions have, is the question the ministry has not yet had to answer publicly.
