Kayode Kolawole
A lecturer at the Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta, Prof. Samuel Oluwalana, has said Nigeria is losing a huge amount of money for its failure to export human faeces, cockroaches, as well as, scorpions to foreign countries.
The Professor of Forest Resources Management said this in Abeokuta while speaking on the theme, “Unearthing The Treasures In The Forest” at the 47th Annual General Meeting of the Abeokuta Chamber of Commerce, Industry, Mines and Agriculture, Abeokuta.
According to him, “One butterfly is bought for $500 in Singapore. We can imbibe the South African culture by producing bees. Cricket also generates money. Nigerian scorpion, one is $50,000.
“A gallon of 4.75 litres of the venom is $99 million. The Chinese are taking it away, no one is questioning them. Instead of destroying scorpions, you can sell them.
“Cockroaches are the number one food now, we don’t eat cockroaches in Nigeria, they eat in other places, we can produce and send to them, and they will buy. There is a man in China, that has up to six billion cockroaches, overnight, he became a multi-billionaire.
“Human faeces can be processed into charcoal for cooking. Now, Americans will be making $3.5 billion every year from gold extracted from human faeces. They are also taking human faeces to space to protect the astronaut.”
The don, therefore urged Nigerians to pay attention to Indigenous Knowledge as a window for people to explore the wellspring of knowledge and experience that are relevant to them, describing indigenous knowledge as a gold mine, a veritable source of age-old methods of understanding the uses of nature as medicine and wealth.
The don also said that Nigeria has a great chance to get billions of naira from the exportation of a large number of cockroaches to China, where they are consumed.
