An Ominous Year Ahead -By Ike Willie-Nwobu

It is time for those politicians who promised Nigerians stomach infrastructure to keep to their promise because as things stand, the raging hunger now is nothing compared to what is in store for Nigerian stomachs in 2025.

According to the food insecurity and malnutrition analysis of the United Nations World Food Programme,33 million Nigerians face food insecurity in 2025.

To say it has been a difficult year for Nigerians would be to put it mildly. As the country has transitioned from one administration to another, costs of living have flown off the racks, plunging many Nigerian families into despair and destitution.

Nigerians thought they had seen it all in eight years of a listlessness and cluelessness under former President Muhammadu Buhari, but new levels of immiseration have been reached under an administration that is showing that its feathers are not different after all.

A key issue in Nigeria under the current administration has been hunger. But this hunger has a long provenance. Years of conflict in the North has exacerbated the grim conditions of a region whose agriculture was once the only thing it offered Nigeria. Relentless attacks on farmers and their farms by non-state actors, displacement, and a lack of support from the government has seen many agrarian families lose their land and their livelihoods. Torn away from their source of sustenance, the hunger many families face is akin to the one Biafran children reckoned with during the Nigerian civil war.

Malnutrition has become a key problem for Nigerian children, who have seen food routines disrupted, and food rations reduced until disappeared altogether. Without adequate food for bodies which have to negotiate the considerable

Horror of being Nigerian, the door to many diseases have been rattled open. The chilling consequence is that graveyards have run out of gaps for the grim reaper’s ruins.

Hunger means many things to different people. But at a primal level which peels away to primeval times, hunger translates to anger. To say that there is a lot of anger in Nigeria currently is an understatement. The protests which have rocked the country this year have been undergirded by hunger.

People who used to afford up to three square meals in a day now struggle to eat one good meal a day. All over the country, it is the same story of economic hardship translating into impossibly lean times for families who are being forced to make do with very little.

When people are pushed to the wall and there is no space to run into, they become like animals at bay, and are forced to take drastic actions.

That is what is being witnessed in Nigeria today, where the government is struggling to contain expressions of displeasure and discontent from its citizens.

Nigeria appears to have been caught cold and out by what has largely been a decade of insecurity and un stability. The response offered by authorities in the country has been largely tepid. This has left many of those who depend on the government for their welfare largely exposed and vulnerable.

The year 2024 will go down as one of the most difficult in Nigeria’s recent memory. The predictors show that 2025 will be even more grueling.

Just when things should be getting easier, they are getting harder. Countries hardly survive such brutal conditions. No country thrives in them.

Ike Willie-Nwobu,
Ikewilly9@gmail.com