EPISODE SUMMARY: The discussion examined whether Nigerian communities can be designed to feed themselves. It explained that housing, agriculture and land use are treated as separate conversations in Nigeria when in practice they function as one interconnected system. The conversation moved across sustainable community design, permaculture principles, farm banking, cooperative ownership models and land access. It stressed that food security is less about turning every home into a farm and more about intentional planning, shared responsibility and collaboration between professions that currently work in silos. It also explored the economics of building food producing communities, including how cooperative and share-based models can make agricultural investment accessible beyond wealthy households. It closed with a look at where public and private sector partnerships can strengthen land access, value addition and logistics.

[Dr Oluwanbepelumi Olanubi]: Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Kingsgate Brief, the podcast series of Kingsgate Advisors Institute. It’s good to be back again today, and of course, as you know, we are returning with fresh conversations, a deeper perspective, and the same commitment to making important development, economic, and policy issues easier to understand and more useful for everyday decision-making. At Kingsgate Advisors Institute, one of the things we care about is taking ideas that often remain in the boardroom, research papers, policy rooms, investment meetings, development conferences, and bringing them into conversations that people can actually connect with. Kingsgate Brief is one of those ways we do that. We invite participants, practitioners, thinkers, and leaders to help us unpack issues shaping Nigeria, Africa and the global economy at large in a way that is practical, thoughtful and accessible.

My name is Dr Oluwanbepelumi Olanubi. I’m the executive director of the Institute, and today I’m hosting this conversation. But before we go deeper into what we have for you today, I would like to encourage you to connect with us on all our social media platforms. Like our posts, engage with them, comment and let us know what your thoughts are, particularly on LinkedIn and on Instagram. Also, on our YouTube channel, I encourage you to subscribe and turn on the notification bell. It’s important that you are one of the few people who know exactly when we post our podcast series or any other important updates. I also encourage you to visit our website, explore our pages, and I’m sure you’d be able to pick a thing or two that will help your informed decision on a daily basis.

The conversation of today is one that shapes how we live, where we live, and even the land used generally in Nigeria. The question we need to start asking ourselves is, can we actually build communities that feed themselves with housing, farming, and land use in Nigeria? In Nigeria, we tend to discuss housing as one separate issue, agriculture as another separate issue, and land use or land planning as an entirely different conversation. Conversations on housing often focus on affordability, accessibility, housing deficit, and others. When it comes to conversations on agriculture, we talk about farmland, food prices, and rural livelihood. And when we talk about urban planning, we focus on roads, drainage systems, escape infrastructure, just to mention a few. But in practice, what actually happens is that these systems work together, and they are connected. When you really think about it, these are not separate issues.

A community is not only a collection of buildings, but it is also a place where people need food, water, work, movement, safety, market access, and a healthy environment. How we design our communities affects whether the land is productive or wasted. It affects whether food travels a long way before it reaches its household or users. It affects whether flooding becomes worse or people find local livelihoods attractive to live in. Hence, when we ask whether communities can build themselves, we are not suggesting that every neighbourhood must produce rice, maize, fish, potatoes, or grains for its residents to consume. The real question and a more practical one is whether Nigerian communities can become more productive, more resilient, and more intentional about food, land, water, and livelihood.

This matters more right now in this context because food prices have remained under pressure, and most households are finding it difficult to actually survive, given the high cost of food. Cities are expanding very quickly, and farmlands are being converted to estates and commercial spaces. Climate pressure is also affecting livelihood, water supply, soil production and food production in general. So, the question is: can we build more houses? It’s more like how we build communities that actually work. To help us think through this properly, I am delighted to welcome a notable guest this evening, Architect Folasiji Bomi-Daniels.

Architect Folasiji Bomi-Daniels is a Chartered Architect, Construction Management professional, Certified Permaculture Designer, and strategic investment executive with over a decade of experience spanning architecture, project management, regenerative agriculture, finance, and sustainable community development. Popularly known as “The ArchiFarmer,” he is pioneering innovative models that integrate Architecture, Agriculture, Finance, and Technology to create sustainable farming communities that generate long term economic, environmental, and social value. He serves as the Chief Investment Officer (CIO) of the Kabzeel Group, an ecosystem of companies, cooperatives, and communities committed to building sustainable wealth through real estate, agriculture, finance, and enterprise development. In this role, he leads strategic investments, financial planning, innovation, and business development initiatives that advance the Group’s mission of creating resilient and regenerative communities.

Folasiji is also the President of Kabzeel Cooperative Multipurpose Society, where he oversees the management and development of over 400 acres of agricultural assets and community investment projects. Through the cooperative, he champions inclusive wealth creation by enabling individuals and communities to participate in sustainable agricultural and real estate investments. As the Program Director of Ikara Farm City, he leads the planning and implementation of a 2000-acre regenerative development project spread across 2 Nigerian States that integrates architecture, agriculture, ecology, tourism, enterprise, and community development into a thriving, future-ready settlement. The projects serve as a practical model for regenerative development, environmental stewardship, food security, and community prosperity. Folasiji is the creator of the Farmbanking concept, an innovative investment model that combines land ownership with productive agriculture to deliver both environmental impact and long-term financial returns.

Through his work as The ArchiFarmer, he continues to advocate for regenerative development and sustainable farming communities that restore ecosystems while creating wealth and improving livelihoods. He is a graduate of the Joseph Business School. Folasiji is also the visionary behind the OUTBOX Programme, an initiative dedicated to equipping young people with digital, entrepreneurial, innovation, and leadership skills for the future economy. He is an author, an accomplished speaker, strategist, and thought leader. Folasiji contributes to conversations on regenerative development, community wealth creation, food sustainability, cooperative economics, and innovation-driven enterprise across Africa.

Ladies and gentlemen, please join me to welcome our notable guest, Architect Folasiji Bomi-Daniels. Good evening, and thank you for joining us.

[Architect Folasiji Bomi-Daniels]: Good evening, Doctor, and thank you for having me. It’s a privilege to be here.

[Dr Oluwanbepelumi Olanubi]: I have actually been looking forward to this conversation, and at the end of today’s conversation, I hope that our viewers will go with five major things. First, a thorough understanding of why housing, agriculture, food security and land use must be discussed together. And to also have a simple, practical explanation of permaculture and why it matters in the Nigerian context. We expect you to have an insight into how homes, estates, and communities can be designed to support food production without turning every place into a farm. We also expect that at the end of this conversation, our viewers will have a realistic sense of whether these ideas can be affordable, commercially viable, and even inclusive. We will hand over to you practical steps that households, developers, communities, and governments can begin to take to use land more productively. And if you ask me, I would say, let’s jump right into it.

I would want to start with this, Architect, when you hear the word, or when you hear the phrase, a community that keeps itself. What comes to mind? How would we explain that in practical terms in the Nigerian context today?

[Architect Folasiji Bomi-Daniels]: All right, thank you very much. Brilliant question. What comes to mind is the future that I’m currently creating and the future that I want to see everywhere. A sustainable community is a community that integrates several aspects of its needs into things that it can produce. Not necessarily that it can produce everything it needs, but that the bulk of basic things are produced by themselves, including energy, including food, including managing health resources, and then ensuring that they work with the earth to improve the earth with their agricultural practices. So they produce the bulk of their food, manage their water resources, maximise the sunlight or produce energy from whatever means that they have, and they design intelligent climate-smart buildings.

[Dr Oluwanbepelumi Olanubi]: Interesting. Over the course of this conversation, I’m sure we’ll dive a bit into what you’ve just laid out, especially for someone without a background in agriculture or even architecture. I want to start at the foundation: how do we usually plan, keeping the Nigerian context in mind? How do we plan housing, farming, markets, water, and land as separate issues, without bearing in mind that each is part of a bigger community, or how a community functions as a whole? Why do we usually do that, and what impact does that have on the environment in general?

[Architect Folasiji Bomi-Daniels]: Thank you very much, Doctor. Brilliant question again. I’d like to share a bit of my own story. Professionally, I’m a trained architect, and throughout my journey, I found that there’s very little mention of how to take care of the earth for other users, transport users, and farmers. My mother, of blessed memory, was into agriculture, and that fueled my own passion for it. I began to realise that much of what we consider important as architects, the earth, climate change, regenerative design, and passive design, is the same thing that agriculture specialists talk about. They say we must protect the earth, work against climate change, use passive design, and so on.

But in the permaculture association I’m privileged to lead, I see that agriculturalists are trained to focus only on agriculture, and architects only on architecture, separately, when both of us are really dealing with the same earth. We work in isolation when we should be collaborating. Our curriculum is designed to make us masters of one profession instead of teaching us to work with other professions collaboratively. That’s one of the core challenges.

[Dr Oluwanbepelumi Olanubi]: True, I agree with you, because we can see that these professional segments work in silos, and it isn’t helping the community. So, let me ask you, as an experienced architect: how can architects or developers design homes or communities that support food production without turning residential homes into farmland? What concept brings that to life, and practically, where has it been adopted? I’m not talking about having a garden in your house, I mean, how can we build an entire community with that kind of ecosystem?

[Architect Folasiji Bomi-Daniels]: I love where this conversation is heading. For those of us in the built environment profession, architects, engineers, mechanical engineers, structural engineers, service engineers, and urban designers, we need to recognise that we’re all concerned about the earth and should pay particular attention to it. This is a design thinking system that works, and it’s already working in similar contexts across the world.

One approach is this: our homes don’t need to become full farms, and our farms shouldn’t need to become full-blown residential areas either. The real challenge is that urban areas are gradually swallowing up peri-urban areas, the zones just outside city limits, before you reach truly rural land. As cities grow through urbanisation, people push into and encroach on those areas without careful planning for food systems. Land that was originally meant for farming gets bought up by developers, often for what’s called land banking, where people buy peri-urban or rural farmland purely for speculative reasons, because it’s close to the city.

As both an architect and a farmer, one of the things we’ve developed is a farm banking concept, an upgrade to land banking. Many developers buy land, fence it, and let it sit idle for years, so productive land stays hidden and unused. Our approach is: if you’re going to buy that land anyway, why not farm it while you wait for its residential value to grow? You can produce goods that support the food economy in the meantime.

There are also what are called eco-villages: purpose designed communities that combine residential and agricultural areas. I also promote a concept I call “foodscapes,” which works even in urban areas. Everyone’s familiar with landscaping, but I’m saying we should integrate food into that. Landscaping often serves a purpose like shade, and a fruit tree can provide that same shade while also giving you food. It provides a double benefit.