Viewing events of the past week from the gallery, I was not surprised that the symbolic campaign against beef consumption in the South, jointly launched by Afenifere, Gani Adams and Sunday Igboho flopped on its first day. Sure Lagos households could go for a day or more without beef, “cattle meat” as we call it around here. After all, there is goat meat, stock fish, chicken, freshwater fish, sardine, ham, bush meat, snails and shrimps to resort to as alternatives but not many Lagosians did that, from the reports that I read and the pictures from markets that I saw.
I was personally involved in a “beef boycott” in 2010. Following a sudden bout of chest pain, a physician at the National Hospital prescribed several drugs, ordered some lifestyle changes and sent me to the dietician. Don’t eat beef, the dietician ordered; only chicken and fish. I proceeded to the market and bought 30 chicken and lots of fish. In less than a week, I felt I could no longer eat the fish. In my childhood days we used to regard chicken as a luxury food item but after another week, I didn’t want to eat it again. I almost shed tears when I saw it in my next meal. The dietician later modified the order; you can eat beef, once in a while.
Not only is beef the one meat around here that one can eat day after day without getting fed up, but it is also the cheapest. I thought fish should be cheap because the fishermen catch it in the wild rivers and lakes, but it is not. A single fowl weighing a few kilos [together with its feathers, bones and claws] now costs N2500 and above while a kilo of choice beef, shed of bones and skin, costs about N1600 in Abuja markets.
You can do many things with cow meat, including cooking, roasting, frying, pepper soup and the dried meat called kilishi. If the hundreds of trailer-trucks that bring cattle to Lagos every day are no longer coming, courtesy of a traders’ strike, sure Lagosians can get alternative supplies from Argentina, Spain and Australia. Of course the cost wouldn’t be the same because you must factor in the costs of animal feed, good quality pipe-borne water, Vet doctors and vet medicines, developed country taxes, bank charges and profits, shipping, refrigeration and port charges, even if government decides to waive Customs duty. Compare that to a local cow that feeds on weed around our farms [sometimes with farmers’ crops added as snack], drinks water from muddy ponds, transports itself on its own legs and pays no taxes since 1974, when General Gowon abolished jangali cattle taxes in his annual budget speech.
I am also not sure about the taste. We only have to compare the taste of a local free-range chicken versus that of what here we call “agric chicken.” The latter is bigger, but it requires a lot more Maggi and salt to make it just a little bit tasteful. Or the taste of fish caught in rivers with that grown in Nigeria’s growing number of fish farms. Pastoralism and the activities of bandits associated with the pastoral community have become a political hot-potato topic in this country, but we should not allow rogues to lead the search for a solution. Where are this country’s eminent sociologists, animal scientists and vets?
The flopped beef boycott was a response to the “boycott” of the South mounted over several days by the Amalgamated Union of Foodstuff and Cattle Dealers of Nigeria, AUFCDN. Some media houses deliberately upped the ante by calling it a “blockade.” Is stopping one’s food-laden trucks from crossing the Jebba bridge, one of many entry points to the South, what you call a blockade? How does that compare to President John Kennedy’s blockade of Cuba during the 1961 missile crisis, when warships surrounded the whole island and stopped and searched every approaching vessel? Or closer to home, the federal land, sea and air blockade of Biafra during the civil war?
The traders themselves called their action a strike, akin to what NLC, Petroleum Tanker Drivers, ASUU and JOHESU do when they withhold their services. A strike does not stop the customer from getting alternative supplies, if he can. They also had a good reason, as far as I can see from the gallery, because sacking a whole market and burning dozens of trailers because a Hausa man spilled rotten vegetables in front of a Yoruba woman’s stall in Shasa market looks like a good reason, to me. They demanded for N4.5 billion in compensation. Since government paid ASUU members N40 billion after they refused to work for a year, I think this one is chicken feed, sorry, beef feed. Why did the media call this strike action a boycott and a blockade? They didn’t say ASUU blockaded university campuses.
The puzzling thing here is why the Presidency stood askance while the strike lasted. Sure DSS picked up the cattle traders’ leader for questioning, but it was left to Governor Yahaya Bello and Mr. Femi Fani-Kayode to work out a truce and get the trailers back on their way. Is Yahaya Bello in a position to pay the N4.5 billion compensation? Can he stop the check point extortions along the entire highway that the traders complained about? And can FFK really guarantee their safety, despite his claim that Igboho stood ready to welcome the trailers back to the South?
Meanwhile, as some newspapers gleefully observed, the traders lost billions in rotten onions, tomatoes and vegetables while the strike lasted. Don’t gloat yet. The traders could rush back to Yahaya Bello and add a “non-victimisation clause” in their agreement, ASUU style. They could demand that Lagos consumers still pay for the goods and services that were withheld during the strike. In the end that is what will happen. The losses will be steadily built into the prices of the next consignments, the same way that American tobacco manufacturers ensure that smokers pay for government-imposed “sin taxes” by building them into cigarette prices. The same way that kolanut merchants who bring the nuts from the South to facilitate Northern weddings, naming and turbanning ceremonies will make all kola chewers to pay for the disrupted supply trucks.
