The streets are filling up with crowds of angry, hungry people. Niger state was first last week when housewives and their daughters marched to protest escalating costs of food. The police moved in with force to break up the protests and detained a couple of women. A day later, the state government said they should be released unconditionally. Almost at the same time, Kano’s residents exploded in a rash of anger for the same reason: food prices are hurtling through the roof. Here, unlike in Niger, the security forces held back. Two days later, they broke down warehouses of food merchants who were hoarding edibles.
An echo of the violent and deadly anti SARS protests of October 2020? Not quite so yet. However, how the government handles the present starvation protests in this their early stage will either stymie or fuel them. A crackdown will certainly release what author John Steinbeck calls “armies of bitterness” on the streets. The governing party, All Progressives Congress (APC), however, has put the wrong foot forward, blaming the opposition for masterminding last week’s protests. One may ask, if the opposition had that capacity of mobilizing that huge number of citizens to “rebel” against the government, how come they lost the presidential election a year ago. This blame game isn’t going to help the government. Only in January, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu acknowledged in a New Year’s Day national broadcast the hard times the majority of Nigerians had been made to bear, mostly because of the difficult economic decisions his new government had taken.
What more, some influential traditional rulers like the Emir of Kano, Alhaji Aminu Ado Bayero and the Sultan of Sokoto Alhaji Abubakar 111 who, because of their proximity to the people feel their pulses better, have warned that there is mass hunger in the land and that people could no longer hold back their frustration with the government. “We’ve reached that level (where) people are very agitated, people are hungry, they are angry,” he told a meeting of the executive committee of Northern Traditional Rulers’ Council last Wednesday in Kaduna. The Sultan is the chair of the council. He said so far the angry armies of the unemployed poor had heeded their rulers’s plea to not over react. But they couldn’t be expected to fold their arms for long. “We must find jobs for our teeming youths that are sitting idle and I have said it so many times, we are sitting on a keg of gunpowder; teeming youths, millions of them without jobs, without food. We are looking for trouble,” he said.
President Tinubu, as though responding to the warning from the traditional rulers, has asked his agriculture minister to open the food reserve silos and release grains to the poor. We are not told the holding capacity of the reserves but the president said a hundred thousands tonnes were to be released. Will it be sold or given as another “palliative”? Will it be enough and what percentage of the population will it go to? Questions and questions. Tinubu’s suggestion that the window of food imports be left open tells us that the food reserves, assuming they do exist, do not contain much. When the reserves run out of grains, is the government going to continue with importation? Can it be sustained? What about how to get the food across to those in real need? The government bureaucracy is notoriously hopeless. The stuff, as happened during the sharing of fuel subsidy palliatives, simply will disappear into thin air between the silos and points of delivery. Or they may be broken into and the food stolen. Or worse, it may have gone bad due to expired shelf lifespan.
This is not good, not even the imports window which, already, is coming off the hinges. Ukraine, which is a major grain exporter, is at war. Reopening our borders with, Niger for example, will presumably allow cereals like beans to come in. Buhari closed them in 2021. I say presumably because Tinubu can’t reopen them even if he wants to because there is an ECOWAS ban on trade with Niger because of a coup in the latter on July 25 2023. Now Niger, Mali and Burkina – all three now under military rule – have quit ECOWAS altogether.
So, the starvation conundrum is not anyone’s fancy to grab attention; it is real. Just as the government’s lack of fresh ideas as to how to tackle it. There wasn’t much crop after the rains last year because few farmers had access to their plot for fear of being attacked by bandits and or kidnapped for ransom. Those that did are not releasing their harvests into the market, hoping to create an artificial scarcity that will force up prices. And they are right. With the naira exchanging at 1,300 to the dollar in the open market, food prices are going haywire, spiraling out of the reach of the poor. The fireplace is cold in most families. When former transport minister, the late Umaru Dikko, was told by journalists in 1983 that Nigerians were going hungry, he responded: “I haven’t seen anybody picking stale food from a rubbish dump.” His words were apocalyptic. It is happening now. A clincher: domestic animals like cows, goats, sheep and dogs that wouldn’t touch plastic food wrappings some 10 years ago are gobbling them up – like mad, as they say. The Hausa say, “in dare ta yi dare, buzuzu ma nama ne.” [When there is no meat, anything goes] Will you doubt that there will come a day in this nation when man and his livestock will clash over leftovers at refuse dumps? And some politician would say they are being instigated by political adversaries!
