My AFCON 2025 observatory

Land is strategy, not scenery: What Morocco’s highways reveal about power, policy, and Nigeria’s blind spot

So far, so good—the football matches at AFCON 2025 in Morocco have been excellent. But the real education begins outside the stadiums, on the highways.

Every journey between match venues becomes a masterclass in statecraft. From Tangier down to Agadir, and from Fès to Marrakech, one pattern repeats relentlessly: almost every viable strip of land along Morocco’s highways is cultivated.

Our drive from Casablanca to Fès—about five hours, like commuting from Lagos to Asaba—was a lesson in how not to mismanage economic corridors. We had a similar experience from Fès to Ifrane, Morocco’s “Little Switzerland”.

This is not aesthetic farming.

This is not a coincidence.

This is governance made visible.

AFCON Beyond Football: Highways as Production Corridors

Morocco does not build highways as prestige projects. It builds them as economic arteries.

What AFCON visitors see from bus windows are not random farms, but planned agricultural belts positioned precisely where infrastructure multiplies value. Proximity to roads lowers transport costs, reduces post-harvest losses, and allows even smallholders to plug into national and export markets.

Here, infrastructure is not neutral.

It is productive—or it is not built.

Agriculture by design, not hope

This landscape is the long-term outcome of deliberate policy frameworks such as Plan Maroc Vert and Génération Green 2020–2030.

Land use is planned.

Water is engineered.

Crops are selected for value, not nostalgia.

Farms line highways because the state understands a core principle: public infrastructure must generate private productivity.

Water scarcity did not become an excuse

Morocco is not a water-rich country. Yet its fields remain green because scarcity produces discipline, not resignation.

Drip irrigation is standard, not experimental. Dams feed defined agricultural zones. Solar-powered pumps cut costs. Wasteful practices are discouraged. Highway-adjacent farms are easier to connect to these controlled systems—another reason they flourish.

Export logic shapes the land

Much of what grows along Morocco’s highways—citrus, tomatoes, berries, olives, greenhouse vegetables—is cultivated with export timing in mind. Speed matters. Reliability matters. Distance to ports matters, especially hubs like the Port of Tangier Med.

Agriculture here is treated as a foreign-exchange industry, not a poverty programme.

Nigeria in the same AFCON mirror

Watching this as a Nigerian is uncomfortable.

Across Nigeria’s federal highways, fertile land lies idle—bush-covered, disputed, abandoned, or politically hoarded. Not because Nigerians cannot farm. Not because the soil is poor. But because land is owned sentimentally and governed weakly.

In Nigeria:

Roads are built without agricultural zoning.

Irrigation is seasonal and unreliable.

Idle fertile land carries no consequence.

Ministries operate in silos.

Agriculture is framed as survival, not strategy.

The result is a painful contradiction: vast arable land, yet chronic food imports and rural poverty.

Lessons Nigeria must learn—Now, not later

Every Highway Must Be a Food Corridor

Federal and state roads should come with agricultural belt plans—crops, water access, aggregation points, storage, and markets.

Leaving Fertile Land Idle Is Economic Sabotage

Use-it-or-lease-it policies must replace romantic land possession. Idle land is lost revenue, lost food, and lost stability.

Water is not optional infrastructure

Dams, irrigation, and energy must be planned alongside roads. Rain-fed farming alone is no longer a strategy—it is a gamble.

Agriculture must be export-credible

Nigeria will not fix food insecurity if farming remains charity-driven. It must be profitable, scalable, and bankable.

Coordination Beats Budget Size

Morocco’s success is not about spending more—it is about aligning land, water, transport, finance, and markets.

Final observation

AFCON 2025 reveals a deeper truth: stadiums show ambition, but land shows competence.

When land along highways is cultivated, it signals a state that knows what it wants from infrastructure. When land is abandoned, it exposes a vacuum of policy imagination.

Nigeria does not lack land.

Nigeria lacks urgency.

Until fertile land is treated as a strategic national asset—planned, protected, and compelled into productivity—Nigeria will continue to drive past opportunity every day, mistaking emptiness for normalcy.

In Morocco, land is not scenery.

It is a strategy.

Sola Fanawopo, Chairman, Osun Football Association, writes from Morocco.

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