IT is no longer news that Nigerians are going through the worst cost of living crisis in the history of the country, the news Nigerians are looking forward to read about or hear is that prices of foodstuffs are coming down. But that is beginning to look like a far-fetched hope as there seems to be no indication on the horizon to that effect.

If anything, prices of food items are still on the upward trajectory; rising, and rising. We all know the last time things were good in Nigeria; that was 2015 BC. Get it? Then, we could buy a 50 kg bag of rice for N7-8,000. Children ate well, and also their parents. Then, in 2015, a tall, gangling general from Katsina became president, and our descent into the pit began. Gradually, the price of the 50kg bag of rice began a steady climb, reaching N42,000 by the time the general ended his two-term stay in office.

With Renewed Hope Agenda dominating the airwaves ahead of the 2023 general elections, not a few Nigerians had hoped that things would improve as soon as possible. Lori iro (Lie)! Instead, subsidy on petrol was peremptorily removed and the naira floated, to which the marketplace reacted viciously. Now, a bag of rice sells for more than N100,000. I never thought in my entire life I would have to pay so much for that commodity. But eat I must, like every other person, as a result of which we are all buying at this exorbitant price. No choice, really.

It was perhaps in reaction to the reality that Nigerians had begun starving that the Federal Government announced, last July, a food import waiver programme under which certain grains would be imported into the country. There was also an initiative to make rice available at N40,000 per bag, but that didn’t gain traction.

Specifically, on July 10, 2024, Agriculture Minister, Abubakar Kyari, announced that the Federal Government will suspend duties, tariffs, and taxes on importation of maize, husked brown rice, wheat, and beans through the country’s land and sea borders, for 150 days.

His words: “To ameliorate food inflation in the country caused by affordability and exacerbated by availability, the government has taken a raft of measures to be implemented over the next 180 days.

“A 150-day duty-free import window for food commodities, suspension of duties, tariffs, and taxes for the importation of certain food commodities (through land and sea borders). These commodities include maize, husked brown rice, wheat, and cowpeas. Under this arrangement, imported food commodities will be subjected to a Recommended Retail Price.”

The minister added that in addition to importation by the private sector, the “Federal Government will import 250,000MT of wheat and 250,000MT of maize. The imported food commodities in their semi-processed state will target supplies to small-scale processors and millers across the country.”

That was six months ago, and it looks like the policy was abandoned almost immediately the minister announced it. One question has bothered me about this for long: why was the initiative abandoned?

Informed and uninformed guesses point to bureaucratic strictures that made the policy unworkable. There were insinuations that between the Federal Ministry of Finance and the Nigeria Customs Service, technical details guiding implementation somehow failed to materialise.

Meanwhile, hunger continues to ravage the land. In fact, since then, no other initiative seems to be afoot to bring down the price of foodstuffs. In reality, government has abandoned the governed in hungerland.

In the public domain, there exists a plethora of rationalisations as to why the project never got implemented. One of them was that investors in the agriculture value chain were anxious that their investments could be jeopardised by the effort, which could lead to business failures that will worsen the national unemployment outlook. Bunkum. The truth is that there has never been sufficient investment in food production, which is why the sector became immediately vulnerable to subsidy removal. If food production were on the envisaged scale, we would not only have more than enough to eat, we would also have for export. What these marginal investors in food production simply did was to arm-twist the Federal Government with economic terrorism while they continued to profiteer from the meagre stocks they had been producing. Since last July, has food production increased by these so-called investors? How many more acreages have gone under cultivation? How many more broilers and layers in the poultry farms? Instead, the price of eggs keeps rising. One egg, which was N30 in 2015, BC is now N200!

I am shocked and disappointed that the Tinubu administration fell for the gimmickry of these marginal food producers and opted to let the masses continue to wallow in misery as it gets harder to buy food. I advise the Federal Government to rejig and give life to the food import waiver programme, while the Agric Minister gets to work really hard to increase acreages for cultivation. There must be targets and timelines to these; we can no longer rely on small-scale farmers. If we are to get out of the economic morass, we must start with food production. TGIF, Happy New Year!