Hardship protests and looting spree

It all began with a raft of peaceful protests against hardship across the country. Then they were followed, in quick succession, by a series of egregious lootings.

Hoodlums, in their numbers, halted trucks hauling foodstuffs twice on the ever-busy Abuja-Kaduna Expressway at Suleja and carted their contents. At Dogarawa, Sabon-Gari, Zaria, a stationary truck conveying noodles and spaghetti, was attacked and its contents stolen. Lately, another truck was similarly attacked at Dei-Dei, in the outskirts of Abuja. A warehouse was broken into at Gwagwa-Tasha in Abuja and its contents stolen by hoodlums.

These attacks, in broad daylight, were captured by TikTokers and they went viral. It is feared that unless drastic measures are taken, and forthwith, such as securing warehouses and the highways at points that haulage vehicles are vulnerable to attacks and making foodstuffs available and at affordable prices to ordinary folks, these ugly occurrences will continue. Not only that, they will worsen, driving the country to the brink of anarchy.

In the wake of attacks on haulage vehicles, the Organised Private Sector (OPS) has threatened a shutdown of manufacturing companies. Coming on the heels of the recent mass exodus of multinationals from Nigeria, such a prospect will not only worsen the economy, it will increase the army of the unemployed.

To be fair and candid, Nigeria was not in a good place prior to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s advent to office. Nigerians were buffeted by hardship, heightened insecurity and a notoriously aloof administration. Inflation stood at 22.41per cent. Rather than help matters, President Tinubu compounded them. His cavalier withdrawal of fuel subsidy and the floating of the naira, without putting in place measures to cushion their adverse effects, saw inflation going stratospheric and the Naira plunging to its greatest depth. As at February, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), inflation had reached 29.9 per cent.

The cost of living, which had been prohibitive, went through the roof. The Naira’s worth and value depreciated. Greedy, heartless and unscrupulous Nigerians saw this as an opportunity. They went for the jugulars of their compatriots in an unprecedented dwindle. In near Argentinian fashion, the price of a bag of cement went up, on an hourly basis, until it arrived at N15,000 some weeks ago.

Even when it became crystal clear that the Tinubu administration had not given sufficient thought to, or had not devised a plan ahead of the withdrawal of subsidy on petrol, and that it may have withdrawn the subsidy merely to checkmate the cabal that benefited from it, palliatives were announced with fanfare. Promises were made with gusto that gas-driven, mass transit, buses were to be procured. As at now, the administration of the palliatives has been opaque and fraught with duplicity. At the federal level, the matter has taken a scandalous colouration and we are yet to hear the outcome of the investigation said to have been launched into it. We are also yet to sight the hundreds of mass transit buses several months after they were pledged.

When government makes promises in dire circumstances, such as we are in, and it fails to deliver on them, it creates unflattering impressions of itself: that it is deceitful and that it cannot be trusted. When distrust is compounded by hunger and the high cost of living, occasioned by the withdrawal of subsidy on petrol, they give rise to anger. Sustained hunger and anger can lead to the kind of unbridled desperation at play on our expressways and at our warehouses.

Of course, the recourse to attacking trucks and warehouses and emptying them of their contents should be checked by our security agencies. Their perpetrators should be apprehended and punished to the full extent of the law. But a situation where hundreds of millions cannot eat a decent meal in a day speaks eloquently to a clear and present danger. It is an emergency which should be addressed, using short and long-term measures.

It is salutary that the government intends to make grains available, free, to Nigerians. But how does it intend to do so? Is it in the shambolic and opaque manner of its palliatives which allegedly ended up in the pockets of those who ought to distribute them?  For each such effort, a transparent register of recipients should be generated. These registers should withstand the scrutiny of authentication and ground truthing by independent auditors. Also, grains should be taken to distribution centres in our 8,806 wards across the country where our people live. Their distribution should not be restricted to state capitals or the Abuja Central Business District.

Secondly, the government must, as some of us have often argued, prioritise security. As at now most of the farmers, small and big-time, have scampered off the farms due to insurgency, banditry and terrorism. Large swathes of farmlands across the three geopolitical zones of the North Central, North West and North East have since been abandoned.

Thousands of small-scale farmers are holed up in IDP Camps, idling away. Others have relocated from the villages to “safer” havens. The consequence is that not enough food is being produced. It is elementary economics that when demand outstrips supply, prices will go up. Conversely, when there is a surfeit or glut of commodities, their prices will go down.

Apart from the desertion of farms, in droves, across the aforesaid geopolitical zones, international agencies have warned of the imminence of severe malnutrition and starvation beyond the north-eastern states of Adamawa, Borno and Yobe where they were hitherto consigned. 

Now, the North Central and North West, Nigeria’s food belt, are vulnerable, all thanks to heightened insecurity.

In view of the foregoing, this administration should immediately pre-occupy itself with securing the Nigerian space and facilitating the return of farmers to their farms ahead of this farming season. If farmers fail to return to the farms, surely the prospect will be worse