Land of the overfed

Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Sabo Nanono must be having sardonic fun from his job brief for that ministerial portfolio. He laughs, obviously derisively, when people talk about hunger in Nigeria under the present dispensation – and that is using his own words.

The minister last week foreclosed the possibility there is hunger in the land. (What better state of affairs could make his job in government sinecure, if not altogether an idling leisure trip!) Considering universal indicators of hunger being malnutrition and undernourishment, among others, he said rather than hunger there is indeed pervasive obesity among citizens. That is to say Nigerians are mostly overfed.

Nanono spoke at a news conference in Abuja as part of activities marking the World Food Day, which is yearly celebrated internationally on October 16. According to him, Nigeria is currently food sufficient and any suggestion of hunger in the country is misdirected. He conceded though that there were ‘inconveniences,’ but these, he noted, were being addressed by the Federal Government and relevant stakeholders like the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

“From what I see in this conference room, there is no sign of hunger but obesity. Only a few people like me are either trying to balance their diet, or is it fasting that is responsible for the way some of us look? The policy of the present government for us to feed ourselves is key. In the process, value chains are being created to empower people and give out some jobs. I think we are producing enough now to feed ourselves and I think there is no hunger, but if you say ‘inconveniences,’ I would agree,” the minister was reported saying.

He added inter alia: “When people talk about hunger, I laugh because they do not know hunger. If you go to other countries you will see what hunger is. Food in Nigeria is fairly cheap compared to other countries. In Kano, for instance, you can eat 30 naira worth of food and be satisfied. So, we should be thankful that we can feed ourselves and we have relatively cheap food in this country.”

The minister tamped down fears that the raging challenge of insecurity across the country and flooding resulting from unduly heavy rains may lead to food shortages, saying: “Although there has been flooding and insurgency (in some states), I think the surplus that will be realised in other parts of the country will balance out food shortages in other areas.” He argued as well that Nigeria is not only self-sufficient in food production, but would export to other countries in no distant time.

His whole point, of course, was to justify ongoing closure of Nigeria’s borders by the Muhammadu Buhari administration amidst charges that the measure may have precipitated a food crisis. Hence, he argued that though many people were uncomfortable with the decision initially, subsequent reports from farmers as well as merchandisers in rice and other edibles have been that of commendation. “When government came out with the policy, most people felt uneasy because they were used to imported rice, which sometimes was expired. But we are now seeing the benefits. Some of our neighbouring countries were using Nigeria as a dumping ground, and efforts to let them know failed…One of the biggest producers of Nigerian rice was in my office after the closure of the borders and they had about 600 tonnes of rice in their warehouse, but within the week the borders were closed 50 per cent of that was sold and farmers are smiling. So, as long as these (neighbouring) countries will not respect the protocol the border closure will remain,” he said.

‘Declaring Nigeria a food secure territory where many citizens are obese from overfeeding...was frontally invoking evidential incongruity’

The agriculture sheriff was well within credibility limits to defend the border closure – which, if you asked me, was a necessary bitter pill we should have swallowed all along as a nation but for rank spinelessness in leadership. I hold for all times that we need to be drastic, even to the point of willfully self-inflicting some hardships, if so to root out national ill tendencies like the morbid disposition to abet dumping of items from neighbouring countries that have choked domestic enterprise and militated against local job prospects. By all means, we should learn to discipline our appetite.

But declaring Nigeria a food secure territory where many citizens are obese from overfeeding, as Nanono did, was frontally invoking evidential incongruity. Besides, having this country’s chief food minder ‘laughing’ – he apparently meant ‘scoff’ – over claims of hunger in the land is as disdainful as Queen Marie Antoinette quipping that French peasants should have eaten cake when they were suffering from widespread bread shortages during a famine under the reign of her husband Louis XVI in 1789; or in more contemporary times, Second Republic Transport Minister, the late Alhaji Umaru Dikko, dismissing allegations of pervasive hardship among Nigerians under the late Alhaji Shehu Shagari’s presidency because they were not yet eating out of dustbins.

It is curious that the minister used an audience sample at his media conference in Abuja as sufficient representation of the entire universe of his measurement, namely the country at large. But since he chose such a parameter, we should be at liberty to apply same. And here goes:  

From what we see on Main Street, it isn’t true that most Nigerians have enough to eat, much less being overfed. If there is no hunger in the land, how do we explain visibly distressed children of want who scurry in-between vehicles in traffic lockdowns desperately begging alms? If there is no hunger, why is it that we keep seeing crowds, most of whom do not have vehicles of their own, being irresistibly lured to scoop gasoline they hoped to sell off at token amounts from broken down tankers, despite repeated mass incineration of such freeloaders in the past at the slightest spark? You may want to argue that this has nothing to do with hunger, but why do we not see such suicidal irrationality in other societies where basic access to feeding is guaranteed to every citizen (say, through food stamps) regardless of their socio-economic standing? Then, I am really not sure what kind of menu can be afforded with a 30 naira budget – from whatever supply point – as the minister touted; but why is it that many families even among the elite these days forego major slots of their daily meals, just so to meet up with other pressing responsibilities that the arduous economy is making all the more a tough call?

And we can also apply universal parameters for same argument. True, President Buhari recently disparaged statistics on Nigeria by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), among other foreign bodies, as “wild estimates (that) bear little relation to the facts on ground.” But international data offer a more reliable guide than self-adjudicating local data, which in any event are not articulated as at yet. And so, we cannot ignore the evidence of the 2019 Global Hunger Index (GHI) that ranks Nigeria 93^rd out of 117 countries with a score of 27.9 points, which locates the country as suffering from a level of hunger that is serious. This is against the backdrop of displacement of millions of persons by the Boko Haram insurgency, many of whom depend on humanitarian aid that does not guarantee them steady access to food.

On a larger scale, the World Poverty Clock estimates some 94million Nigerians as presently living below the poverty line. Much of this number perhaps derived from the 23.1 percentage unemployment rate and 20.21 percentage underemployment rate as lately measured by Nigeria’s own official statistician, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). Such data hardly add up to the narrative of a land without hunger. But when you make such a point, the honourable food minister laughs.