The federal government has been advised to swiftly release grains from its strategic reserve depots and ensure the grains get to hungry Nigerians at affordable prices. The call was made by Isa El-Buba, the convener of the Initiative for Better and Brighter Nigeria (IBBN).
El-Buba who stated this in a text titled, ‘Address Devastating Hunger In Nigeria Before It Sparks An Implosion’, made available to BusinessDay on Friday in Jos said: “A hungry man is an angry man and his anger can snowball to have severe consequences if not checkmated”.
He said that the increasing spate of devastating hunger and excruciating poverty taking a toll on Nigerians, if left unaddressed will give rise to an inescapable full-blown revolt by the suffering masses and the revolution will be so swift that it may not be televised.
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“With the increasing spate of devastating hunger and excruciating poverty taking a toll on Nigerians, if left unaddressed will give rise to an inescapable full-blown revolt by the suffering masses – and this revolution will be so swift that it may not be televised. Why? A hungry man is an angry man- and his angst can snowball to have severe consequences if not checkmated.
” This partially explains why the average Nigerian is angry and aggressive on the street. For instance, it was in the papers last week that a woman in Port Harcourt who went into another woman’s plantation and stole her plantain in order to feed her hungry children was confronted by the woman who owned the plantain, an altercation ensued between them and the woman who stole the plantain hacked to death the woman who owned the plantation with a machete. This is the sad place we are in, in Nigeria today”; El-Buba lamented.
He added that despite the government’s state of emergency on food security, efforts to curb rising food prices have not yielded results with a foreign exchange rate that is rapidly turning the naira into a currency not worth the paper on which it is printed.
The IBBN convener explained that the pervasive inflation was causing a month-by-month increase in food prices, with terrorists chasing farmers away from their farmlands, attacks and kidnaps for ransom on communities in states like Plateau and Taraba who produce a bulk of Nigeria’s food thereby stopping agricultural activities owing to the massive displacement and movement of people from farming zones to IDP camps in their country.
“Every other part of the country is feeling this pinch of hunger and hardship due to the recent high cost of energy and its impact on transportation which all leads to an astronomical rise in the price of food items leading to gnashing of teeth everywhere”.
While appreciating Nigerians for refusing to be hopeless even in the face of suffering, the prophet urged the federal government to resettle and restore farming villages especially in Plateau and Benue States to their ancestral farms, villages that have been initially displaced by Fulani militias with a 20 billion Naira grant so they can go back and pick up their farming lives and contribute to food security efforts in Nigeria.
