I was still in secondary school when he was president, and as a village kid in Ovim, my problem was never food. You were guaranteed one loaf of Ezioma bread (15 kobo) in the morning. On the days after the main Oriendu Market, you could upgrade to Our Society bread. Our Society bread was “imported” from Enugu, from the bakery of Chief Umunna who never forgot his village even though he was serving Enugu people.
Fact be fact, even though I did not technically understand his many playbooks, but by reading books, I can extrapolate that IBB (Babangida) was a good operator even though he scaled many bad things in Nigeria. Besides playing roles in the construction of many core infrastructures in the nation, IBB did something history will remember him. He messed up with SAP but in the 1990s, in the bid to recover, he liberated the banking sector.
Today, from GTBank to Zenith Bank, Access to modern UBA, and beyond, some of the leading banks in Nigeria were created within 1989 to 1993, and a policy framework made that possible. Check data, banking powered the 1990s and early 2000s in Nigeria’s economy before telecoms took over in the mid 2000s.
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So, we have a deal as Nigeria works to overcome a potential lost decade, what can the nation do? It may be time to revisit whatever IBB did in the 1990s. Can someone replicate the bounded financialization of Nigeria he engineered in agriculture? Can someone pick healthcare? What of education? I mean with the right policies, these sectors can grow, boom and advance Nigeria.
That would be a better plan than creating a bureaucracy just to regulate food prices: “In a bid to combat the persistent rise in food prices and ensure food security, Nigeria’s Federal Government has unveiled plans to establish a National Commodity Board…The National Commodity Board will be tasked with assessing and regulating food prices while maintaining strategic reserves of essential grains and other food items to stabilize prices.” This first part could have a negative impact on the market; the second part is good policy.
Good People, we know the reasons why food prices are up and they’re mainly because of insecurity and weakened exchange rate. Due to insecurity, farmers need battalions of soldiers to protect them in their farms and because those are not available in the “food basket of the nation”, supply is reduced. When that happens, prices are expected to go up.
Also, as some food items are imported, if Naira loses value, prices are expected to go up. Focusing on insecurity to help farmers return to farms, and dealing with Naira weakening will deliver better results than blind regulation of food prices with a new bureaucracy. I am hoping that this bureaucracy will return a statement: for farmers to breathe and for food prices to drop, please fix insecurity in farms, even as you do all for the Naira to improve its standing.
This first part could have a negative impact on the market; the second part is good policy: “In a bid to combat the persistent rise in food prices and ensure food security, Nigeria’s Federal Government has unveiled plans to establish a National Commodity Board…The National… pic.twitter.com/3wRgdMMFRO
— Ndubuisi Ekekwe (@ndekekwe) February 14, 2024
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The people who cannot even drive away bandits, kidnappers and terrorists from our farmlands are telling you about commodity board. We are dealing with people who, as you are pointing the moon to them, they are busy looking at your finger. You know what that means…
Again, why do we always link agriculture with millions of jobs? You need millions of farmers to feed a country? Next you hear is supporting small-holder farmers with fertilizers and co, to produce what and for who exactly? Just to scale poverty obviously.
The small foods that bandits and their cousins allowed some farmers to produce, have we factored the cost of moving them from point A to B giving the high cost of diesel? Have we accurately modelled how it affects last miles pricing? They just open mouth waaa and convince themselves that they have got a grand solution. Not so fast.
If we have just 300 large-scale farmers with meaningful input subsidies given to them, each with thousands of workers in a mechanized setting, where you may even deploy helicopters or drones to apply fertilizers, do we know what that would mean to our food productivity output? We just keep wasting time on things that never solve any problem.
These creatures are no good.