Northern Nigeria and the unholy trinity

Poverty. Insecurity. Hunger. Call them the unholy trinity with a cold grip on northern Nigeria. Last week, the World Food Programme and the Food and Agriculture Organisation released a report indicating that the old region was in the company of 22 countries classified as “world’s newest ‘highest alert hunger hotspots.’”

Our country is in the unwanted company of such countries as Ethiopia, Madagascar, South Sudan, Yemen, Burkina Faso, Afghanistan, the Central African Republic, Colombia, Haiti, Honduras, Syria, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. These are troubled countries, some of which like Ethiopia, Yemen, and South Sudan, are embroiled in civil wars. If wishes were choices, we should not be in the company of these other countries where the stomach rumbles, because of the permanent absence of food.

But we are marginally better than they are in that we are fighting insurgency, bandits, and kidnappers, not a civil war. Still, one had always feared that because of the insecurity that has forced our hardworking peasant farmers to abandon their farms for safety, Nigeria could not escape paying the price for failing to secure its citizens. Food would necessarily be scarce. And it is now.

Hunger is a global problem. It has been and remains a beast the world is unable to chain despite incredible advancements in agricultural science and food production techniques. Hungry children are still familiar sights in many countries. How can anyone mistake the extended stomach imposed on spindly legs as anything other the effect of the ravages of hunger and famine? One meal a day is still a luxury millions of people cannot afford. What is so pernicious about hunger is that it is birthed by poverty. Wherever there is poverty, there you would find hunger and the ultimate in the disaster progression, namely, famine.

It is no secret that northern Nigeria is the poorest of the former four regions in the country. Experts put the poverty level in the north-west geopolitical zone at 80 per cent. This is not a challenge the northerners and their leaders were unaware of it. The current situation has merely worsened an existing problem. It dares the people and their leaders to blink. It is in the nature of human societies that problems are happy to grow from strength to strength if they are ignored or treated like an irritant that would go away. If the rising level of hunger in the region drives more and more people to the streets with begging bowls, then this nation that is beyond shame and shock will be shamed and shocked.

The World Food Programme UK and Om Ved Gardens hosted something called Chef’s Table with the theme “Nigeria, Feast and Famine,” in London on June 10. The programme was intended to draw global attention to “the unfolding food crisis in Nigeria (and) highlighted the rising food prices and devastating conflict faced by Africa’s richest nation in the wake of Coid-19 pandemic.”

Chi Lael, World Food Programme communications officer for Nigeria, said the conflict in the country “has led to the displacement of 7 million people who do not know where their next meal will come from.” People in IDP camps, she said, depend entirely on WFP for their food.

What we are facing is clearly not a northern Nigerian problem. It is a national problem. Northern Nigeria cannot be a hungry island on the vast ocean of the well-fed. We are all in this together, even if the north bears the heavier burden. The region is still the food basket of the nation. The old region matters. What happens to it matters to the rest of the country. What affects it affects the rest of the country. Its hungry people are the nation’s hungry people.

The UN agencies warned in clear terms that the situation is grave because the “economic repercussions of Covid-19 and the climate crisis are expected to drive higher levels of acute food insecurity in 23 hunger hotspots over the next four months.” And there would be deaths from hunger too. Both agencies say that “2020 saw 155 million people facing acute food insecurity at Crisis or worse levels in 55 countries… The vast majority of those on the verge are farmers.”

The Food and Agricultural Organisation had repeatedly warned in the past that hunger was rapidly bearing down on Sub-Saharan Africa.  Some countries in the region listened and acted to bar hunger from their borders; others treated the warning almost as a joke; something that sounded great on paper but was not worth worrying about in the great citadels of politics where ignorance is wisdom and insouciance is action.

Yet, see what is happening. Poverty is ravaging our land. Insecurity is ravaging our land. Hunger is ravaging our land. But none of that has put the nation’s foot on the reproductive break. The labour wards in our hospitals are welcoming babies in large numbers every week. More babies are swelling the national population. At the rate we are going, experts estimate that Nigeria would have the third largest population in the world by the year 2050. It is a prospect filled with foreboding.

Some Nigerians see nothing wrong with this imminent population explosion. They see it as an asset, something to be proud of. After all, the more we are, the merrier. It is a cynical view of a serious problem. No nation regards population explosion as a blessing. At least, I know of no nation that has celebrated it or offered thanksgiving to God or the gods for filling their part of the earth with more mouths than they can feed.

When India saw itself on the verge of overtaking China as the most populous country in the world in the seventies, its formidable prime minister, the late Mrs Indira Gandhi, knew it would not do much good for the country. She introduced drastic and effective birth control measures to prevent the labour wards from bursting. India steadily rose from its position as a third world country to a nuclear power because it controlled its population at a level it could feed, house, clothe, educate, and offer the majority of them employment.

There are strong enough reasons why we should not toy with treating over-population as a welcome event. We are a poor nation; a larger population will not improve our economic situation; we are a hungry nation; it would be cynical to suggest that if we cannot feed the present population, we can feed a larger population; unemployment is a serious problem for our educated youths and other skilled labour.  A population explosion would result in unemployment bomb. There is no running away from putting the brake on our reproductive capacity.

To do that requires a hard-headed, rather than a cosmetic or sentimental, approach to the problem. The nations that put a break on their reproductive capacity were not disobeying God’s order to man to go out there and multiply. They solved a problem. And they are the better for it. We need a national population policy if we must save our country from the twin problems of poverty and hunger and the ramifications therefrom.