I promised myself that I would, in a non-violent way, deliver this message in the language that everyone understands. One way to make this possible is not to clutter what I am about to say with statistics that anyone with a smartphone can easily verify.
So, here we go.
The Nigerian government is relentlessly removing food from the dining tables of both her rich and poor citizens. They do this through avoidable and criminal disregard of the dangerous conflicts raging in the hinterlands of our country.
And, just to be clear, this is not about President Muhammadu Buhari and his inept administration; the problem has been going on since President Olusegun Obasanjo handed over power in 2007 and, in a less brazen fashion, the immediate administrations after him. The only thing that can be said with certainty is that the current administration unintentionally exacerbates the problem. I say “unintentionally” because the administration appears not to appreciate the cost-benefit implications of the latent policies – and politics – it pursues, which end up aggravating the problem.
The problem, which is about 10 years old, is a relentless displacement of peace in the hinterlands of Nigeria, and its direct negative impact on both the quality and quantity of food available on our national dining tables. At the heart of the problem is a simple matter of peace that smallholder farmers who predominantly live in the hinterlands need to survive. I refer to the people who own small plots of land on which they grow subsistence crops nationwide. Through a corruption-laden fertilizer and other fiscal policies, they are also encouraged to grow cash crops, which they sell to buy the things they need.
Nigerian smallholder farmers essentially produce the food the nation consumes; some will say all of the food we eat. I have seen statistics, which claim that smallholder farming accounts for 99 per cent of the food consumed in Nigeria. Also, I’ve heard it said that the North has become the food basket of the nation, referring to distribution of output of smallholder farmers in that region. There are no reliable production numbers to back up this claim, but we often regard the Benue-Taraba axis as the major source of the food served at the dining tables of southern Nigeria.
To digress a bit, the claim that northern Nigeria produces the food that the South consumes is a dangerous and disprovable exaggeration. It is dangerous because this could help to fuel the covert policies that ignore the major challenge that southern smallholder farmers face. It is an overstatement because whatever is being produced by smallholders in the North often does not go beyond the cities to villages in the hinterlands of southern Nigeria. I don’t see food crops from the North when I visit my village. The only things I see are spices and the like. Consider that our population statistics show that we have more people living in our hinterland villages than in townships. Which means that there is no doubt about it that it is the southern smallholder farmers that are responsible for feeding the greater population of people living in the South.
The reason smallholder farming is such a strategic security imperative is the fact that we are yet to develop mechanized agriculture to the point that it takes care of our domestic food needs. Not even in the North has this been achieved. As it turns out, therefore, Nigeria’s food security, sadly, continues to rely on yearly outputs from the informal agriculture sector where our smallholder farmers operate. At the end of the day, and beyond the politics of who produces what food, in what quantity and for whom, two indisputable facts stare us in the face. First, Nigeria depends on smallholder farmers for her food needs. Second, we have denied these farmers the peace they need to continue in business. Whether in the north or south of Nigeria, the farmers face the exact same existential problem. Feeding a population in excess of 200 million in a country that has failed to produce and export anything other than crude oil implies that agriculture will continue to be the Number One contributor to the country’s GDP. And this being the case, the role of smallholder farmers cannot be wished away or downplayed without devastating consequences.
Regrettably, this is exactly what we have been doing since June 2015 – wishing away and downplaying the role of smallholder farmers, especially in southern Nigeria. We do this by denying them the one commodity that they need to continue to be in business – peace. Without peace, our smallholder farmers have been fleeing their land. Many have abandoned farming in the North-East region. Millions more are being pressured to leave their farmlands in the three southern regions. In my region, the South-East, majority of smallholder farmers have fled their farmlands already. They now huddle in fear at home, waiting on us – the children and relations who live abroad or in Nigerian cities – to send them money to buy, rather than grow, the food they eat. It has become an expensive joke among many of us who live in townships. In the old days, city dwellers would always expect our relations in the villages to fill our car booths with yam tubers, garri, palm oil and vegetables as we leave to return to our stations. Today, city people fill up their car booths with yam tubers, garri, palm oil and vegetables on their way to their home villages.
One consequence of this displacement strategy is that, in many villages of Eastern Nigeria, the farmlands are growing back into jungle forests, good only for grazing! Herders have happily taken over, erecting their temporary tents and using village women and their men for sport. For the larger Nigerian population, there is real fear of famine inexorably bearing down on the country. And this because we do not want to give peace to the people who provide 99 per cent of the food that the nation eats. Rather than give our local farmers peace, we continue to allow Boko Haram to chase them into IDP camps in the North, and to turn the other way as armed herdsmen bully them away from their farms in the South.
When we think about it, there are at least three conclusions that can be drawn from what is happening in our country. The first is that what is happening to smallholder farmers in the north and south of Nigeria directly threatens citizens’ “stomach infrastructure” and invites famine on a scale never witnessed before. The second is that the way it is being managed exacerbates the differences among the peoples of Nigeria and threatens national unity – much more than the actions of separatist agitators. The third is that it has inadvertently nurtured a policy that somehow sees victims of smallholder farm displacements – and those who want to protect them – as villains.
If we were to put them on a scale, what the likes of Nnamdi Kanu and Sunday Igboho are doing can be likened to protecting the southern victims whose means of livelihood are being destroyed by bullies who appear to be protected by guns from state and non-state actors. I personally do not like their methods. Still, one may not like their methods – raising a counterforce or upscaling smallholder farm protection to full-scale separatist agitation – but one cannot disprove the fact that their original intention was to protect southern smallholder farmers who were (and are still) being bullied in the hinterlands. In contrast, what bandits and insurgents are doing in the North and South are actions designed to directly remove food from our dining tables, inadvertently fuelled by ethnic politics. We should all be careful because, if we add food insecurity to the other insecurities that Nigeria experiences at this moment, the world will hear it.