THERE can be no clearer indication of Nigerians’ deep immiseration than the present grave food insecurity which is already snowballing into widespread starvation. The vast majority of the citizenry cannot feed themselves. The preponderance of feedbacks from citizens on the internet and based on physical interactions paints a grim picture of food crisis in the country. Curiously, the veritable issue is not even primarily that of food scarcity but essentially the inability of citizens to purchase foodstuffs because the prices have gone through the roof. Available statistics from an official source, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), bears eloquent testimony to the graveness of the situation. The year-on-year increase in the prices of staple foods ranges from 125 percent to 250 percent, and is still soaring! There is hardly any geopolitical zone without food security challenges, though the severity with respect to specific staples differs from one zone to another. Some staple food items like beans and gari, hitherto categorized as poor people’s food, have been priced out of the reach of the common people.
It is the case that medium-level income earners in the land have suddenly become poor, and are barely able to conveniently purchase food items that used to be associated with the poor. Even the rich are not spared as they too are making lifestyle adjustments to their purchase of luxury items. It is perhaps only in the official circles that lifestyle adjustments dictated by the burgeoning economic hardship in the country are hardly discernible. Poverty has so deepened that the average Nigerian cannot afford basic food items like rice, yam and beans. Three or four years ago, it would have been inconceivable that the common local measure of beans would be sold for as much as N5,000 or a tuber of yam for N8,000 or N10,000, but that is the reality today. The situation is as confounding as it is frightening.
It is clear that government and its various ad hoc intervention programmes have failed miserably to arrest the dangerous drift. Disturbingly, it does not seem to have realised that its economic policies and interventions are wrong-headed and inherently incapable of salvaging the dire situation. The precipitate removal of subsidy on PMS and floatation of the naira has led to economic crises even as the cost of governance rises by the day. The combined effect of the two precipitous interventions has been the exacerbation of headline inflation and, more significantly, food inflation. The bitter reality is that most Nigerians are living in abject poverty following the government’s much trumpeted reforms. Insecurity has contributed to the crisis but it has not been concretely addressed: terrorists are still killing farmers for sport, thus discouraging people from farming. And the situation is made worse by the fact that the food baskets of the country, especially in the North, are most negatively impacted by the heightening insecurity caused by the heinous activities of terrorists that have yet to respond to official intervention or give any strong indication of abatement.
Sadly, the government has failed to apprehend the burgeoning hunger in the land and the enormity of the challenge. Otherwise, a critical component of the legislative arm of government like the House of Representatives would not have been mulling the donation of just half of the basic salaries of its members, which amounts to tokenism, to fight hunger. Not a few believe that if the Green Chamber had actually understood the severity of the situation, it would have donated half of its total budget after backing out the portion for the bureaucracy that services it. Indeed, the government and the political elite, if not the entire elite class, would also have tweaked their ineffective and inessential responses to the crisis. Is it not disturbingly annoying that the government is still busy pretending that its policies are working while dishing out miserable palliatives to pauperized Nigerians?
Pray, what would rice for a single meal do to hungry Nigerians in their millions, especially when they are not in a position to provide food for themselves and their families because of the runaway prices of foodstuffs? Certainly, the hunger in the land is not amenable to palliatives and ineffectual propaganda. Indications are rife that the administration of palliatives in the country is suboptimal. It is either they do not get to the intended beneficiaries at the right time and in the right quantities or they are diverted and not distributed at all. In any case, Nigerians do not need handouts to address their food difficulties as they used to feed themselves ordinarily without government handouts when food was not priced out of their reach.
In what amounts to a knee-jerk reaction to the challenge of hunger in the land, the government is planning to facilitate the importation of duty-free grains and regulate the prices at which foodstuffs are sold in the country. Yes, given the dire situation in the country, this may help in bringing down the domestic prices of basic foods, and it is as such not a totally bad idea, but the fact remains that it could have been avoided if the government had focused on increased food production and agricultural productivity from the outset. Again, a deliberate and specific policy to attract many of the unemployed youths into agriculture, especially food production, ought to have been put in place if the government truly had a full grasp of the severity of food insecurity and the panacea for it. Besides, there is nothing stopping governments at subnational levels from collaborating based on geopolitical zones to facilitate increased food production in their respective zones instead of focusing on the centre alone to work the magic. Yes, the current hunger and general economic hardship in the country are largely spinoffs from the Federal Government’s suboptimal policy options, but the citizens that are negatively impacted reside in the sub-nationals.
There should be an end to policy experimentation. The focus should be on the implementation of home-grown policies and interventions that have the potential to resolve food crisis, economic and other national challenges on a sustainable basis. It is a sad commentary that for more than one year since the current government mounted the saddle, complaints of hunger and misery have become very strident and pervasive. That does not bode well for the public perception of the capacity and competence of the incumbent administration. It is thus imperative that the government sits up and tackles the economic problems before things get out of hand. Ultimately, it will be futile to stop hungry people from becoming angry.
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