Give Us Our Daily Bread…

“Hunger is not my portion”, a Nigerian would quickly interject if you as much as suggest to him that the current food crisis in many parts of Africa, including Nigeria, will, if unchecked, lead to mass hunger and economic dislocation.

Bishop Hassan Kukah has famously warned us to be careful with people who believe that good ‘portions’ fall from the sky and that even if the world around them was collapsing, they would somehow be shielded by Providence without lifting a finger.

A deus-ex-machina device is supposed to inoculate the ‘anointed’ against food inflation and other economic woes. But what’s the reality? According to the World Bank’s Food Security Update, 2024, certain African nations continue to experience exceptionally high food inflation:

“Domestic food price inflation remains high in many low- and middle-income countries. Inflation higher than 5 per cent is experienced in 59.1 per cent of low-income countries (no change since the last update on May 30, 2024), 63 per cent of lower-middle-income countries (no change), 36 per cent of upper-middle-income countries (5.0 percentage points higher), and 10.9 percent of high-income countries (3.6 percentage points lower),” says the World Bank.

To taste the glory of food sufficiency, the hard work of agricultural production has to be done. It is far better to be cash-poor, housing-poor, clothing-poor and dirt-poor than to be food-poor.  Woe to the land that cannot feed its people. It will be a wretched supplicant at the mercy of its inferiors! It will never be respected in the comity of nations.

Rising food costs increase the risks of hunger and malnutrition, especially for vulnerable populations including children, the elderly, and those residing in rural regions. There is also the added risk of societal unrest resulting from rallies, strikes, and even riots organised by local groups as we have seen ever so often.

“Ebi Npa Wa!”

The cry of “Ebi npa wa!”, with which Lagosians greeted President Tinubu during his first post-inauguration visit to Lagos could easily have been dismissed as orchestrated if not that the pandemic of rumbling stomachs was a national emergency which confronted government officials wherever they went. The president has since acknowledged that there was a serious shortage of grains and other essential food items in the country and has therefore approved the removal of taxes on various food imports as an emergency measure to prevent escalation of the present problem.

How Can Nigeria Navigate Its Way Out Of This Bind?

First, we don’t need to remind ourselves that the Buhari administration economically denuded the country before exiting. Only a comprehensive forensic audit can reveal the true extent of damage done by that administration. Having said that, Tinubu is not going to be assessed on the basis of his inheritance but on his legacy. It is what you do with what you inherited that matters.

And that, as always, is my focus — lighting a candle instead of cursing the darkness. We are lucky to have some of the best brains in agricultural policy and production in the world. We cannot get out of this hunger trap without deploying our best intellectual assets to tackle the problem. And one voice we must heed, indeed cultivate, is that of the President of the African Development Bank (AfDB), Dr Akinwumi Adesina, who, like many of us, is scandalised that Nigeria has regressed so low as to be frantically importing food into the country.

One of the transformative High 5 priorities of the AfDB is  “Feed Africa”. The programme is designed to strengthen food security for Africa through a transformation of African agriculture with the hope that by the end of the 10-year strategy, Africa’s farmers, the majority of whom are smallholders, will be feeding the continent and supplying vibrant agro-processing industries.

Nigeria In Bad Company

So, if wishes were horses, Nigeria wouldn’t be spending scarce foreign exchange to bring in food that it could otherwise be producing in such quantities as to have surplus for export. As it is, unfortunately, the continental statistics are frightening as detailed in the Food inflation figures from the World Bank’s Food security report. The 10 African countries with the highest food inflation are listed as follows: Malawi. 40.7; Nigeria. 40.7; Sierra Leone. 32.4; Egypt. 31.0; Ethiopia. 25.5; Ghana. 22.6; Angola. 18.5; Zambia. 16.2; Tunisia, 9.6; Côte d’Ivoire, 8.6

Nigeria is in bad company. A country sitting on many rivers should not be washing its face with spittle. Not when it has the human and material resources to solve the problem. In Africa, we don’t pack faecal matter with our hands when we have a hoe. Nigeria is blessed more than any African country with the required experts.

The Nigerian-born President of the African Development Bank, Dr Akinwumi Adesina, was the 2017 World Food Prize Laureate. He was the fifth African to win the coveted honours that recognises individuals who have advanced human development by improving the quality, quantity or availability of food in the world. Such a man should be among those manning our corner before we make key policy decisions on agricultural production.

Glory Years

As Minister of Agriculture in the Jonathan administration, Dr. Adesina introduced many novel schemes which made access to agricultural inputs unbelievably stress-free. To reduce the quantity of wheat flour needed for making bread, he introduced the cassava bread which was a mix of a recommended percentage of cassava flour with wheat flour in the bread making process. As a sensitive consumer, this writer could hardly tell the difference at the time. The Buhari administration reversed all the gains and the nation began its backward spiral into corruption, brokerage by middlemen and reduced food production,

In the wake of the crisis and the announcement of the Nigerian government’s initiative to embark on massive food importation with a generous suspension of duties, tariffs, and taxes on the importation of maize, husked brown rice, wheat and cowpeas through the country’s land and sea borders for 150 days, Dr Adesina warned that Nigeria’s reliance on food imports could undermine the country’s agricultural sector and food security.

Speaking on the theme ‘Food security and financial sustainability in Africa: The role of the Church’, Adesina said, Africa “must feed itself with pride,” warning that, “a nation that depends on others to feed itself, is independent only in name.”

Dr. Adesina is convinced that, “Nigeria should be producing more food to stabilise food prices, while creating jobs and reducing foreign exchange spending, that will further help stabilise the Naira… Nigeria cannot import its way out of food insecurity. Nigeria must not be turned into a food import-dependent nation,”

The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), has declared that Nigeria tops the global list of countries with the highest number of people in acute food insecurity, with 31.8 million individuals affected. Africa also accounts for nearly a third of the more than 780 million people worldwide who are hungry.

This kind of bad news is being generated in a continent with 65 per cent of the world’s uncultivated arable land, and the potential to feed 9.5 billion people by 2050! The frustration of the multiple award-winning technocrat is therefore understandable as he declares that, “Unless we transform agriculture, Africa cannot eliminate poverty.”

And then the clincher from Adesina: What Africa does with agriculture will determine the future of food in the world. If we get our acts together as we ought to, we should be feeding the world!

MR PRESIDENT’S TASK

If I were President Tinubu, I would organise a private retreat with AfDB’s Adesina, Afreximbank’s Benedict Oramah and other technocrats and experts in allied specialities to help chart an escape route for the ship of state away from this food importation iceberg.

Despite being touted as the food basket of Africa, Nigeria has spent over N7.8 trillion in the past six years on food import. Yet we are unable to assure our people of their daily bread.

Let’s call in the experts. Urgently.