Last month, an accomplished monetary economist rendered a reprehensible narrative on how data on economic indices are often gathered in Nigeria.
He said that a government official was commissioned to conduct an economic survey. The official asked him to handle the survey.
The monetary economist was offered N1 million to do the survey. The strange condition in the assignment was that the researcher does not need to go to the field to do the survey because the stipend was too low to fund a field survey.
The government official handed the researcher an old data gathered from the field and directed him to feed in new figures based on what was the trend gathered from a previous survey.
The monetary economist complied and submitted a set of cooked up data and collected the stipend.
Some months later the monetary economist stumbled on an aide to the top government official who gave him the survey contract. He discovered to his chagrin that the government official was allocated N100 million to do the field survey. That, ironically, is how economic data are often gathered in Nigeria.
The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) is not known for such fraudulent means of economic data gathering. However, since April when NBS data suggested that inflation was in decline, many have complained that NBS inflation figures were miles apart from the reality in the market. Prices climb every day, but NBS inflation figures decline every month.
Three months into the arrival of new yam which was expected to ease the seasonal scarcity plaguing Nigeria, the price of a medium size tuber of yam still hovers around N1,200.
The price of a bag of beans has surged from N18,000 in June 2020 to N75, 000 now. The price was N56,000 in July when NBS figures suggested that food inflation has dropped to 21 per cent. Between July and now it has risen by N19,000.
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) warned in May that close to 10 million Nigerians in 16 northern states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) were starving on the throes of malnutrition, apparently, due to surging prices of food items which the poor can no longer afford. NBS food inflation figures are at variance with that timely alarm.
Ironically, the presidency appears to have a clearer picture of food inflation in the country than NBS. President Muhammadu Buhari in his Independence Day broadcast implicitly acknowledged that food inflation was worsening rather than declining as NBS figures impute.
He announced plans to store food items in a desperate bid to circumvent imaginary obstacles mounted by suspected middlemen.
The problem is that the brewing famine is not exactly the consequence of the obstacles mounted by middlemen. The middlemen have their own contribution to food inflation, but their role may pale into insignificance when weighed against other intimidating factors.
A bag of plantain arrives Lagos from Edo state with a price tag of N3,000. But the unions on ground collect N500 from each bag for doing nothing. That is the role of the middlemen in the president’s assertion.
However, scores of check points mounted by police, soldiers, Federal Road Safety Commission (FRSC) and even Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) raise the price tag on each bag of plantain by a minimum of N500.
At the peak of the lockdown in 2020, there were at least 66 check points between Benin and Lagos. The truck drivers hauling the food items to Lagos spend a minimum of N1,000 at each check point to circumvent crippling delays.
Another cause of food inflation is Nigeria’s deplorable roads. The cost of hauling food items from practically inaccessible rural communities is more than half of the farm price of the food items.
Transporters factor the high cost of maintaining vehicles into their fares. Consequently, the food items get to the urban markets at twice their farm prices.
The president’s assessment of the cause of food inflation actually missed those contributory factors. Ironically, the biggest culprit in food inflation is scarcity. Nigeria is just not producing enough food with its primitive method of farming.
One wonders where the president’s men would get the food items they plan to store. The lunatics fighting western education in the North-east have driven thousands of peasant farmers from the fields since they started slashing the throats of rice farmers.
Herders march their cattle into farms everywhere in the country and feed them with crops cultivated with backbreaking implements. When the peasant farmers complain about the headers’ wickedness, they raid their villages at night and slaughter the complainants, rape their women and raze their huts.
The peasant farmers are tired of complaining because no one listens to them. Many have abandoned farming. That explains why the little food items getting to the market carry atrocious price tags.
Nigeria can fight food inflation. The import ban on food items like palm oil and maize is counter-productive as it borders on putting the cart before the horse.
Architects of the ban believe that scarcity would encourage local production. It cannot. No one can feed 207 million people by clearing the fields with cutlasses and tilling the soil with hoes.
Only mechanised farming can produce enough food for the teeming population. The ban on maize import has crippled the nation’s fledgling poultry industry and driven up prices of chicken and eggs while local production remains static. Mechanised farming can reduce the asphyxiating scarcity and drive down prices as the market is saturated.
Nigeria must also adopt modern method of cattle rearing not only for safety of food crops, but for high milk yield from the cattle. Kenya has since adopted cattle ranching and its herdsmen have no problems with crop farmers.
Besides, Kenyan cows yield 12 liters of milk per day. Nigerian cows grudgingly produce three liters per day after trekking several kilometers in search of food. We can reverse that trend by establishing ranches in the north where land could be obtained just with a flip of the finger.
Besides, it does not make economic sense to transport 28 cows in an articulated truck that charges N400,000 for the trip from Maiduguri to Lagos. Haulage raises the cost of each cow by something close to N20,000.
If the cows are slaughtered and processed in the ranches, one refrigerated truck can carry the meat of 200 cows to Lagos.
That is the cheapest way to fight food inflation. The president’s food storage venture can only be successful if food production rises astronomically.