Nigeria’s Food Crisis Gets Worse, FG Confused

 By Dele Sobowale

“Drought: Kogi Govt; farmers seek divine intervention.”

“Despite harvest, food prices remain high in Taraba.”

“Food crisis may worsen as flood hits 10 states.”

“SEMA seeks govt help as drought dry up crops in four states.”

“Why grains importation won’t happen soon, by stakeholders.”

Like a sudden heavy downpour and thunderstorm, destroying everything, the trope of bad news published on Monday, August 9, 2024, by newspapers, paint a grimmer picture of Nigeria’s imminent food prices this year.

Nigeria: Tackling The Menace Of ‘The Great Flood’

 By Harrison Eromosele

The annual ritual flooding which every  so often besieged and submerged communities, suburbs, towns, and certain metropolises across several states and countrywide has degenerated from being a recurring decimal problem to a recurring death crisis. The havoc wreaked by this year’s deadly flooding is overwhelmingly unprecedented.

Indeed, it has earned for itself, a catastrophic history. This is the great flood of 2022. There are frightening grapevine hypotheses, suggesting that the devastating scale of this year’s (2022) flood condition in relation to 2012 would possibly imply a repeat, once every decade.

Nigeria: The Problem With Gov El-Rufai’s Gonin Gora Demolition Threat

By Moses Ochonu

The problem with El-Rufai is not that he is a bad Governor. The problem, rather, is that he tries so hard to be seen as a good governor, so hard that he ends up undermining his own good works, causing unnecessary controversy, and exposing his bigotry and lack of executive governing temperament. He is a much better technocrat than he is a wielder of executive authority.

*President Buhari and Gov El-Rufai 

He threatened to demolish an entire community, Gonin Gora, in the middle of an ethno-religious crisis. It is a terrible idea to threaten or to actually demolish an entire community whatever crimes some members of that community may have committed. For one, it amounts to collective punishment, a primitive punitive action incompatible with modern, enlightened notions of justice, correction, and recompense. Second, it is a rather lazy, knee-jerk, thoughtless, and ultimately counterproductive response.

Cattle Herdsmen As The New Boko Haram?

By Reuben Abati 
“No matter how far the town, there is another beyond it” – Fulani Proverb.

There has been so much emotionalism developing around the subject of the recent clashes between nomadic pastoralists and farmers, and the seeming emergence of the former as the new Boko Haram, forbidding not Western education this time, but the right of other Nigerians to live in peace and dignity, and to have control over their own geographical territory. From Benue, to the Plateau, Nasarawa, to the South West, the Delta, and the Eastern parts of the country, there have been very disturbing reports of nomadic pastoralists killing at will, raping women, and sacking communities, and escaping with their impunity, unchecked, as the security agencies either look the other way or prove incapable of enforcing the law.  The outrage South of the Sahel is understandable. It is argued, rightly or wrongly, that the nomadic pastoralist has been overtaken by a certain sense of unbridled arrogance arising from that notorious na-my-brother-dey-power mentality and the assumption that “the Fulani cattle” must drink water, by all means, from the Atlantic Ocean.

It is this emotional ethnicization of the crisis that should serve as a wake-up call for the authorities, and compel the relevant agencies to treat this as a national emergency deserving of pro-active measures and responses. It is not enough to issue a non-committal press statement or make righteous noises and assume that the problem will resolve itself. Farmer-pastoralist conflict poses a threat to national security. It is linked to a number of complex factors, including power, history, citizenship rights and access to land. Femi Fani-Kayode in a recent piece has warned about Nigeria being “on the road to Kigali”, thus referring to the genocide that hobbled Rwanda in the 90s as the Hutus and the Tutsis drew the sword against each other. Fani-Kayode needs not travel all the way to Rwanda. Ethnic hate has done so much damage in Nigeria already; all we need is to learn from history and avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.

Ethnic hate, serving as sub-text to the January 1966 and July 1966 coups, for example, set the stage for the civil war of 1967 -70. The root of Igbo-Hausa/Fulani acrimony can be traced back to that season when Igbos were slaughtered in the North, the Hausa/Fulani were slaughtered in the East and Nigeria found itself in the grip of a “To Thy Tents, O Israel” chorus. Ethnic hate also led to the Tiv riots, crisis in the Middle Belt since then, and the perpetual pitching of one ethnic group against the other in Nigeria’s underdeveloped politics. We should be careful.