AGCOMS Launches Academy to Tackle Skills Gap in Nigeria’s Mechanisation Drive
.Declares tractors alone can’t drive agricultural transformation
James Emejo in Abuja
AGCOMS International Trading Limited, yesterday announced the launch of the AGCOMS Academy to address the shortage of skilled operators, technicians and managers threatening to undermine the country’s drive to mechanise agriculture.
Chief Executive Officer of the company, Mr. Chijioke Okoli, said while significant investments had been made in acquiring and deploying tractors and other agricultural equipment, inadequate attention had been given to developing the human capacity required to make the machinery productive.
According to him, the skills deficit could determine whether expensive agricultural equipment becomes an engine of productivity or ends up underutilised.
“Machines are the easy part. The hard part, the part that decides whether a tractor works a thousand hectares or sits rusting behind a shed, is the person operating it and the business running it,” Okoli said.
He explained that the academy was established to bridge the human-capital gap by equipping personnel across the mechanisation value chain with practical technical and business skills capable of translating machinery investments into higher productivity and commercially viable agricultural enterprises.
He said, “That is the gap I want the Academy to fill: the human capital that turns equipment into productivity, and productivity into profit.”
AGCOMS, an authorised dealer of agricultural equipment, has built experience in the sector through the sale, servicing and deployment of machinery and had previously trained more than 380 people across the public and private sectors.
Okoli said the experience had demonstrated that successful mechanisation depended not merely on the availability of equipment but on the competence of the people responsible for operating, maintaining and managing it.
“You do not mechanise a country by shipping in equipment alone. You mechanise it by building the people who make the equipment productive before they arrive,” he said.
The academy’s initial programmes will focus on tractor operators and technicians, mechanisation-service entrepreneurs and managers overseeing agricultural operations.
Its flagship programme, Mechanisation Enterprise Management, is scheduled to commence in Abuja in November, with plans to subsequently broaden its training portfolio to include supervisors, business owners and executives within the agricultural mechanisation ecosystem.
Okoli said the institution would adopt an industry-driven model, using real equipment, field experience and the commercial realities of agricultural operations as the foundation of its training, adding, “We teach what we operate”.
The launch comes amid renewed efforts by the federal government and private-sector stakeholders to expand agricultural mechanisation as part of measures to raise farm productivity, strengthen food security and modernise Nigeria’s agricultural sector.
AGCOMS had already participated in the training of tractor operators under the mechanisation programme of the National Agricultural Development Fund (NADF), including the initiative targeting the training of up to 4,000 operators ahead of the deployment of 2,000 John Deere tractors.
Beyond technical training, Okoli said the Academy would seek to reposition agriculture among young Nigerians as a technology-driven and commercially attractive sector.
“Modern agriculture is a technology business and an entrepreneurial one,” he said.
He said the broader objective was to develop a new generation of professionals capable of operating machinery efficiently, managing mechanisation businesses and improving the productivity of agricultural assets.
In the long term, Okoli said AGCOMS hoped to build the Academy into a respected institution whose graduates would contribute to the development of Nigeria’s mechanisation sector and eventually extend their expertise to other African markets.
“We are not trying to be the biggest school. We are trying to be the one that made the sector work,” he said.