The essence of the National Food Security Council, set up exactly three years ago by President Muhammadu Buhari, has been put to question as food cost spikes and herdsmen, bandits and kidnappers become major threat to farmers, particularly in the country’s food belt region.
President Buhari in March 2018 inaugurated a National Food Security Council (NFSC) to among other things develop sustainable solutions to farmers and herdsmen clashes, climate change, piracy and banditry, as well as desertification, and their impacts on farmland, grazing areas, lakes and rivers.
The Council is also expected to find lasting solutions to smuggling and as well engage in regional and global discourse on food security, especially as it relates to the situation in Nigeria.
Members include the governors of Delta, Ebonyi, Kebbi, Lagos, Plateau, and Taraba states as well as ministers of agriculture and rural development, budget and national planning, environment, industry, trade and investment, interior, finance, and water resources.
Secretary to the Government of the Federation; the Chief of Staff to the President; the National Security Adviser; the Chief of Defence Staff; the governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria; the director-general of the State Services; the director-general of the National Intelligence Agency, and the comptroller-general of the Nigerian Immigration Service are also members.
But three years down the line, the Council, the president personally chairs, has ill-performed, barely heard of, while the country’s food supply and security woes worsen.
In markets across the country, cost of food items has risen far beyond the reach of the citizens, majority of whom live on less than $1 a day.
Food inflation has retained an upward trend, rising sharply to a record high of 21.79 percent in February 2021, according to latest numbers from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).
Surging food costs have been blamed significantly on widespread insecurity.
Many farmers in the Northern region say they can no longer go their farms as demand for harvest fees by bandits become the new norm in a country struggling with a weak economy.
The farmers in Zamfara, Kaduna and Katsina states, for instance, say they sometimes pay up to N1 million to harvest their crops, while in some cases they face outright death if they fail to pay additional ransom.
In 2020 alone, bandits killed 937, kidnapped 1,972 in Kaduna, according to a report released last week by the state government. Same last week, emirs reported that bandits abducted 100 miners, killed 10 people in Zamfara.
Daily reports of bandits and kidnapping are rife, not only farmers have been affected, several schools have also been shut down.
Anibe Achimugu, president, National Cotton Association of Nigeria and managing director of Arewa Cotton, told BusinessDay that, like many of his members, he was not impressed with the performance of the Council, except for rice production the CBN has been championing under its Anchor Borrowers’ Programme.
“I’m not very impressed at the NFSC. Generally speaking, what they are set up to do is to ensure productivity of food crops in Nigeria so that we can attain food security,” Achimugu said.
He said a major concern everybody, including the council, needs to look at is insecurity, which means farmers not being able to go to their farms even after planting to harvest.
“It’s quite scary and quite worrisome indeed and no matter what policies we have in place, if the physical activity of farming cannot be carried out then there is problem,” he said.
He called on the council to reconsider the Agro-Rangers programme for ensuring security of crop farmers and also deploy it as a means of employing Nigerian youths currently jobless.
BusinessDay recalls that at the inauguration of the council, authorities, including the then governor of Lagos State, Akinwumi Ambode, had raised optimism of a paradigm shift in the Nigeria’s economic diversification quest, particularly as the council would be chaired by the president.
President Buhari himself assured that the council would develop new programmes and projects to protect and indeed create more jobs in farming, fisheries, animal husbandry and forestry.
He listed the commitments of the council to include investment in research and development, developing local programmes, protecting Nigeria against dumping of foreign goods, and holding consultations with relevant stakeholders.
With such assurances, Nigerians were hopeful of returning to the glorious years of the First Republic when food and cash crops were the mainstay of the economy, and various regions of the country prided themselves of being dominant producers of certain crops that stood them out and earned the country huge foreign exchange.
But unemployment has risen to 33 percent, second highest globally.
Muhammad Bn-Ahmad, secretary general, Coalition of Civil Society Group for Transparency and Good Governance, is equally of the opinion that the essence of the council has been defeated in the face of the country’s food and security challenges.
According to Bn-Ahmad, the council that was supposed to be visible across the 36 states of the federation, including the FCT could be said to have gone to sleep immediately after its inauguration rather than hit the ground running.
He said, “The council has been inefficient because there is high price of food items these days; rice, maize, tomato and other food items have gone beyond the reach of Nigerians. And the essence of the National Food Security Council is to ensure that these prices will come down so that the ordinary man in the country can afford to buy it.
“So, I will say the council has been working at zero level,” he lamented, while pointing to spiking prices of food items.
“A bag of 100kg maize sells for between N17,000 and N20,000, and it wasn’t like this before. You get it for N7,000, you get it for N6,000 in the past and also, a whole basket of tomato sells for about N5000 which was not the case in the past.
“So, I don’t know what the council intends to achieve. Honestly, things have been very hard.”
Bn-Ahmad noted that the council has only paid lip service to insecurity. The personnel strength of both the military and police is too few to address the security challenges of a country of over 200 million people, he said.
“There is kidnappings everywhere; killings here and killings there. There is no security in the country presently. I expected the council and the leaders both in the National Assembly to rise up and do something about the current security challenges,” he said.
He recalled past government’s assurances to recruit up to 10,000 personnel per state into the police, “But none has worked till today.
“Our military has the same problem of under staff. Numbers are less than what we expected the country to have. So, the kidnapping, the killings are rising daily.”
He thinks that the humongous budgets to National Assembly could be used to beef up capacity of security operatives across the country, saying, “No doubt, the council may have made some impact, but compared to the huge challenges and expectation of Nigerians, its impact could be likened to a drop in the ocean.
“Nigerians may be said to have had their worst experience with regards to quality of life and well-being as well as security of life and property between 2018 and 2021.”
The Federal Government reaction to these attacks appeared to have given zest to the attackers who have not abated till date, he noted.
Though he admitted that 2020 brought a lot of disruptions in the system and may have stalled plans by the Food and Security Council, but some achievement would have been recorded since three years of inauguration.
