When Famine Meets Fasting -By Adekunle Adekoya

This year, both the Christian fasting period, called Lent, which lasts 40 days, and the Moslem month of Ramadan, which lasts 30 days are interlapping. One noticeable feature of the onset of Ramadan here this year, is that the usual fanfare that heralds the month was subdued, to say the least.

As Ramadan approaches, people in the South-West usually say that the month of fasting has come to meet the faithful who are already fasting. This is usually in reference to the adverse economic conditions that Nigerians endure year in, year out, with no respite in sight. Since the Shagari administration, there had been no year in which life was not harder than the preceding one.

In other words, things get worse every year, and have gotten so bad that it is hard to believe where we are now, compared to where we were coming from. It is simply incredible that the cost of a Peugeot 504 GR a/c car in 1984 can barely cover what is needed for a pot of stew/soup for a family of six — Dad, Mom, and four children.

With the removal of subsidy on petrol last May 29, hunger, which was already widespread in the land, became famine immediately. Still, my fellow countrymen and women, strong and resilient as they are, continued to struggle in pursuit of the basic needs of food, clothing and shelter, even as the struggle assumed titanic proportions. So, famine meets fasting in the year of our Lord 2024 in Nigeria.

As both Christians and Moslems fast, our leaders are urging more prayers while doggedly refusing to do what is right. As we all know, most Nigerians don’t pray as hard at home when they travel abroad. One explanation offered by internet trolls is that this is because more than 80 per cent of our prayer points here in Nigeria are what governments have done in countries where the leaders are responsible.

The famine in the land, which we have all seen and experienced through unusually high prices of food items is not something we can tackle with prayers but by hard work. Somebody once remarked that on both sides of the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, praying grounds have taken up all the land, while similar land in other countries are taken up by farms and ranches. We cannot eat by praying; we can only get enough food by going back to the land and tilling it.

Once upon a time, agriculture was the mainstay of the Nigerian economy, with cash crops generating the foreign exchange we needed for other things. We grew cocoa, rubber, oil palm, and groundnuts, and we exported them. Everybody had enough garri, yams, corn, beans, millet, and other staples. Now, we have left the farms for the cities, and the few of us left on the farms can no longer go to the farms because marauding herdsmen militias will attack them, graze their herds on their crops and kidnap them.

And government has failed miserably to secure the people and the pathways to their stomachs. Since 1999 when we returned to democratic civil rule, the state governors have not done much to revitalise agriculture despite voting billions of naira in every budget year. The perception problem that makes agriculture or farming unattractive to the younger generation has not been tackled either; most youths still see farming from the hoe and cutlass perspective.

Again, the famine in the land, is also driven by the high cost of transportation from the rural areas to the cities and from one part of the country to another. Livestock, from which we all get meat, comes to various markets in the Southern part of the country from the North. They come in trucks that run on diesel engines. This should not have been the case if we had developed our rail system from where the British left it for us.

Now, with a litre of diesel selling for as much as N1,500, it is easy to see its impact on the prices of items trucked from one part of the country to another. Again, that is another self-inflicted problem. We allowed our refineries to die, and our pipelines to get rusted underground. We also handled security issues with so much levity that vandals breach pipelines at will; nobody arrests them, and when they are arrested, they almost never face the wrath of the law. We are now importing what we should be refining at home, at great cost. We don’t even determine the price of a commodity we own; those who will buy from us dictate the price at which they will buy.

Our industries are dying because of the high cost of fuel energy; ours is a generator economy. Public electricity is at best unreliable. The little we generate, we can’t even transmit because we insist on a single transmission grid for the whole country. We have 23 power generating plants with the capacity to generate 11,165.4 MW of electricity. How on earth do we expect one single grid to evacuate power from 23 companies still beats me.

Worse, successive administrations have not seen the imbecility in having just one grid for the whole country, despite the fact that the grid collapses frequently and the entire nation gets thrown into darkness for hours, even days at times. In 2023, the national grid collapsed 12 times. In the midst of all these woes, the peoples’ representatives in the Senate had no solutions but instead were bickering over money-sharing. It is the way we are, and I’m afraid, the way we will remain, since our leaders are drawn from among us. Cry, my beloved country!