I happened to be in Nigeria when I heard British Prime Minister David Cameron’s infamous quip about fantastically corrupt countries like Nigeria. Fortunately for Cameron, Nigeria’s President, Muhammadu Buhari didn’t even bother to deny the notion. In an interview on CNN with Christiane Amanpour, Buhari said “I think he’s being honest about it,� and “He’s just saying what he knows.�

Nigerian newspapers that had only days before raged about corruption now rushed to condemn Cameron for suggesting it, and Buhari for admitting it. The press may have been happy to stoke a controversy that sold papers, but ordinary Nigerians also seemed upset, as if they were happier criticizing their own country than having Cameron do it for them.

While this happened I was spending every day discussing cassava with small groups of Nigerian farmers. Every day, I listened sympathetically as farmers told me that they got no help from their government. “We need fertilizer, loans and machinery,� they said, in village after village. The farmers said that they were all alone. It was a familiar story that I’ve heard all my working life, but the Nigerian farmers were much more insistent than most farmers in Latin America, or even elsewhere in Africa. In Nigeria, the highways are of uneven quality and the electricity is on so seldom that any good business is forced to buy a diesel power generator. So at first glance it is easy to agree with the Nigerian villagers, that they have been left to their own devices.

But as Paul has said in a recent story about drip irrigation, projects and governments, for that matter, are not always the best ones to guarantee the production and supply of agricultural inputs, like fertilizers and tractors. It is the job of government to provide roads, electricity and a fiscal environment that allows input dealers to operate fairly. The private sector is better equipped to manufacture and distribute the goods that farmers need.

In my travels I have rarely if ever heard smallholders anywhere describing the good things that their own government has done for them. That’s a bit odd. Governments do have their failings, but they also do good things. They regulate the seed sector, test new crop varieties, and stem the tide of adulterated fertilizers and pesticides, for example. These and other services generally go unnoticed in most countries.

I used to write about how farmers misunderstood insects, because bugs were difficult to observe. Some government services are also difficult to observe, so smallholders scarcely notice them. If a project or an agency gives you a bag of fertilizer, it leaves an impression. On the other hand, if the government animal health inspectors prevent a cattle disease from entering your country, you may not even be aware of this service.

Then several weeks into the farmer interviews, it dawned on me that, for all their grouching about neglect, many of the farmers were complaining in fluent English. Unlike most countries in Africa, in Nigeria I rarely need local language translation. The Nigerian farmers were so literate that sometimes they corrected our spelling of local crop varieties. Most of the villagers had finished primary school and many of the others had gone on to secondary school. A few had attended university.

Nigeria is divided into 36 states, and a federal territory, which sponsor most primary and secondary schools, with oversight from the Ministry of Education. By law schooling is free and compulsory, although in practice parents pay for books and uniforms. Some state school teachers are under-qualified and many of the schools are under-funded. Yet for all the schools’ troubles, at least in the southern states of Nigeria female literacy is over 80%.

Education influences agriculture in many ways, such as the ability to read written instructions on a product, to understand prevailing market prices, to add and subtract enough numbers to know if you are making money or not.

Few other African countries have educated their farmers as well as Nigeria has, even if no one is noticing.