64 million Nigerians struggling for food, By Yemi Adebowale

Olaolu BilauApril 9, 2023

1 minute read

Current statistics from the World Food Programme (WFP) on global food security revealed that 64.3 million Nigerians do not have enough food to consume. This is about 32 per cent of this country’s population. These Nigerians struggle for a meal a day. The WFP, an organisation of the United Nations, stated that the food insufficiency in Nigeria rose sharply in the first three months of this year.

The sad news is that Nigeria is in the club of countries like Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Chad, Sierra Leone, Cameroon, Liberia, Central African Republic, Togo and Guinea Bissau, where so many people are not getting sufficient food.

The WFP report on Nigeria should not surprise anybody. In fact, the agency is just telling us what we already know. Millions of people are glaringly struggling for food in beloved Nigeria. The last eight years have been most traumatic. Rampaging terrorists and bad economic policies of the Buhari government have pushed many under poverty. Many have lost jobs while a huge number of our farmers have been forced out of their farms by terrorists. This is why Nigeria is now the poverty capital of the world. This country has surpassed India as the place with the largest number of people living under poverty.

The Buhari government has spent almost eight years celebrating false food security achievements and pushing out false figures. There are fairy tales of massive increase in rice production, yet, a 50kg of local rice rose from about N7000 eight years ago, to N39,000 today. This federal government has clearly failed to pragmatically address Nigeria’s food crisis. At the state level, the governors have been a big disappointment. They are doing very little on food security. Most of them are living big amid so much suffering in their states. Our local governments don’t even know that they should be contributing to food security. This is the tragedy of the country called Nigeria.