The fight against food inflation is yielding rather insignificant dividends. Even as it has sluggishly declined to 37 per cent, prices of most food items are still beyond the reach of Nigeria’s 140 million people toiling below poverty line.
Inflation, man’s invisible enemy, is working tirelessly to make life miserable for millions of Nigerians. Inflation steals the money in consumers’ pockets even as the bank notes remain with them. It eats into the purchasing power of the money in your pocket and reduces its usefulness drastically.
Numerous factors have been blamed for the spiraling food inflation. Besides the menacing contributions of greedy retailers and transporters to the surging food inflation, infrastructure deficit, insecurity and the menace of Fulani herdsmen have contributed immensely to the spiraling food inflation.
Nigeria’s debilitated rail system is a major handicap in the fight against food inflation. For more than 70 years, Nigeria’s rail system has remained the way the British colonial masters left it. The British built railways to facilitate the evacuation of raw materials from the remotest parts of the north to the Atlantic Ocean port in Apapa, Lagos.
The rail system has remained that way in the last 70 years. No one cared to expand or even modernise it. About 30 years ago, the system collapsed completely, leaving all the land transportation system on dilapidated roads.
That is precisely why food inflation remains adamantly spiraling. Everyone knows that evacuation of goods is cheaper on rail that on roads. That factor is indubitable in an economy where corruption allows different law enforcement agencies to mount illegal toll gates on every kilometre of the road with a view to extorting money from drivers freighting food items from Nigeria’s inaccessible rural farming communities.
An articulated truck hauling food items from the far north to the market in urban slums in Lagos wades through a minimum of 100 road blocks where the driver parts with a minimum of N500 at each of the illegal toll gates mounted by the police, soldiers, Federal Road Safety Commission (FRSC), Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) and even some vigilante groups.
Those road blocks increase the cost of transporting the food items to their destination by a minimum of N50,000 per truck. In extreme circumstances the truck driver could part with something as high as N100,000 before he gets to his destination.
The truck drivers factor the extortion at the illegal toll gates into the bills they pass to traders hiring them to freight the food items to the market.
If Nigeria had a functional rail system, too things would combine to bring down the cost of hauling goods from the farms to the markets. The first factor is that the illegal toll gates are not mounted on rail ways.
Consequently, the cost of hauling food items from the farms to the markets would be reduced by a minimum of N100, 000 in some circumstances.
Besides the fact that the rail system circumvents the illegal toll gates mounted by corrupt law enforcement agencies, the normal cost of hauling the food items on rail is, in some instances, 50 per cent cheaper than by roads.
The federal government is making frantic efforts at rehabilitating the railways but the rehabilitation may not be fast enough to help in the battle against food inflation.
The development appears to stop at rehabilitating the old rail lines built by the British colonial masters. No one is expanding the rail lines.
There is no rail link between the east and the western parts of Nigeria.
The Calabar-Lagos Coastal Road project is designed to have a rail line in its middle.
But the earliest anyone could talk of completing the project is eight years. Even that is an assumption that may be inhibited by financial constraints.
No one expects that project to make any input into the current war against food inflation when it comes to tackling the infrastructure deficit fueling inflation.
The next factor fueling food inflation is Nigeria’s daunting insecurity. Bandits have driven peasant farmers out of the fields in the north east, north west and some parts of the north central.
In some parts of Niger State, bandits are more efficient in tax collection than the state government. They collect N20,000 from each peasant farmer before they are allowed to enter their farms.
In Zamfara state, the bandits claim they were funded by top politicians and they speak with more authority than the state government. In the final analysis, they have succeeded in driving the peasant farmers out of the fields. Borno state is a sad reminder of the security challenges in Nigeria.
Even as the military claim to be having the upper hand in the contest with Islamic fundamentalists in the state, few peasant farmers can venture into their farms as the terrorists could slit their throats.
The consequence of the insecurity is that millions of peasant farmers are not only rendered unemployed but their contribution to the nation’s food production has been severed. That explains the supply deficit driving food inflation in Nigeria. Peasant farmers account for 70 per cent of Nigeria’s food supply. When millions of them are rendered unemployed everyone knows what that means for food supply.
The interminable war between Fulani herdsmen and crop farmers in most parts
of the country is another factor behind the dwindling food supply.
The herdsmen have the upper hand in the battle between them and crop farmers. Few of the crop farmers can complain when the herdsmen march their cows into their farm and watch them feed on the crops.
Farmers who dare to challenge the herdsmen almost always pay with their lives. They would march into the village in the night with their AK-47 rifles and mow down the complaining farmers. Few of them are standing trial for the cruel murders.
Someone has to clip the wings of the herdsmen and bandits if the peasant farmers must return to the field and produce enough food to bring down prices.
Food inflation: Insecurity, infrastructure deficit factors
