However, in spite of this rivaled position occupied by Nigeria, many other factors such as famine, drought, hoarding and rampant exportation of food items are the bane of availability, abundance and cheaper supply of food in the country. Most at times even at the zenith of harvest season; prices of food items fresh from farmlands do not indicate a favourable gesture that common man would find them affordable before the next harvest turns around.

Activities of shylock middlemen, who are always in greed to make quick money which penetrates down into everything, including speculative deals in farm produce, easily give away the hope of common man to reap and enjoy nature’s gift in form of staple food items produced on our very land.

Nigeria has over the years, witnessed and underwent divergent food revolutions, as masqueraded by different regimes headed by either Khaki people or plain-clothed men. There were – ‘Green Revolution’, ‘Operation Feed the Nation’ and similar tagged large scale food production policies that came and went into cans of history, but without imbibing, sustaining and developing those past, seemingly well-intended policies, so as to make the country self-sustaining and self-reliant as far food production and supply.

In spite of the numerous dams, water channels, rivers and streams that could be fully utilized, as well as the vast land mass in the Northern part of Nigeria that could be used for irrigational farming, all these nature-gifted opportunities were simply disregarded and left idle and un-used. Instead of encouraging, empowering and modernizing the agricultural potentialities of Nigerians by the authorities, a common, poor farmer is left to continue using the simple tools on his inherited farmlands, stooping lowly to hold the hoe and till the land to the stress of his daily waning energy.

Instead of the governments to be harnessing both Nigeria’s greatly nature-endowed potentialities with the modern technology towards achieving maximum result in agriculture, they preferto use our oil money in importation of bagged rice from India, America, Thailand and the rest. This, apart from straining our hard-earned money which could, otherwise have been used for other developmental pursuits, it is also encouraging idleness, decapacitating and parasitic attitude in our abundant human resources.

Not only that we lack productive initiative and habit but we also lack maintenance culture and future projection plans, whereby we can procure powerful food reservoirs in preparation of emergency periods such as famine, drought and say, war (God forbid). Although the Federal and State Governments in Nigeria have procured Silos and stores for keeping reserve-food, the existing one and the system as a whole calls for a serious review and expansion, for it to be more effective and to impact on the generality of the people. Such reservoirs could not have been more useful and timely than now, when prices of food items are increasingly skyrocketing beyond the purchasing power of the poor people. The food price hike is partly due to the over whelming inflation in the country and most importantly, due to the low harvest recorded during the last rainy reason, in many states of Northern Nigeria. With the activities of food hoarders and smugglers, the situation was worsened the more. This definitely warrants for the importation of food items, which suppose to be undertaken by the Federal Government, or for the government to issue licenses to as many importers as possible, who should also be backed by import waivers, to facilitate their imports. Doing this would allow for higher supply of food items, hence the possibility of lowering their prices to much affordable levels.

Most often, governments seem to be ill-advised or loose focus on important things such as this one.

Instead of spending lavishly on less important things, the money should have been used on food importation. A very good recent instance is the money earned by Nigeria as debt relief from the Paris Club. Instead of just sharing the money unilaterally among the three-tier governments without specifically designing goals and projects to be done with the money, part or whole of the money could have been better used to boost welfare of Nigerians by importing food items and the rest. This is a matter of utmost importance, now and always.

ISA MUHAMMAD INUWA is a journalist in Kano, E-mail: ismi2000ng@yahoo.com, P.O.Box 4534, Kano, Nigeria.