Thoughts On Reducing Prices Of Food Items

By Jesutega Onokpasa

PREAMBLE:
There is nothing currently more stressful to the generality of Nigerians and making our government and party unpopular than the utterly insane and quite perplexing continuous increase in the prices of everyday food items.

For the sake of our dear citizens as well as the political fortunes of our President and party, we just have to find drastic means of quickly ameliorating the situation while also instituting a new paradigm in the management of our agricultural sector for the purpose of ensuring access to food at affordable prices while ensuring sustainable food security.

The truth is that the diabolical increase in prices of goods and services, especially of food items, derives more from pure greed on the part of all manner of actors along the supply chain than to the sorts of macro and micro economic factors that are the usual culprits with respect to inflationary trends.

We must therefore factor this into our approach to tackling the monster presently tormenting the citizens of this nation.

A. SHORT TERM MEASURES:

1. Flood the market with the most important basic food items at rates that would leave hoarders, distributors, middlemen, speculators, cartels and traders no choice but to reduce their prices or not be able to sell their accumulated stocks.

2. There are those items government could easily import in massive quantities and those that might be more difficult or even impossible to import – rice, for instance, is pretty easy to import, while yams should prove far more difficult, even as something like cassava or cocoyam might be quite impossible to find abroad in importable quantities.

3. So what do we do? Saturate the market with what you can easily import and it becomes a far cheaper alternative to what you cannot import – if rice becomes ridiculously cheap compared to garri, for instance, people will simply make do with rice and shun eba for their dinner tables until the price of garri is brought down to affordable rates by the low price of rice.

4. Infiltrate the market unions and the cartels and destabilise them from within; sow seeds of division amongst them and instigate opposition and rivalry within their ranks.

5. Go after the maniacally greedy usurious speculators, middlemen and traders arbitrarily increasing prices and start at the top – take out the shepherd and you can scatter the flock.

6. Identify and target those most responsible for the completely unhinged increase in food prices for any possible breaches of the law on their part.

7. Scrutinise the finances and other activities of hoarders, speculators and similar saboteurs; have they been paying their taxes or engaged in shady activities? Pounce on them and legally to take them out of the scene or leverage that to get them to behave.

NOTE: We are facing a food inflation emergency that demands emergency countermeasures, at least in the short term.

B. LONG TERM MEASURES:

1. Whatever we have budgeted for agriculture is grossly inadequate across all three tiers of government and we must now apply an emergency approach to farming and animal husbandry, starting immediately throughout our country.

2. We must immediately correct the rather uninspiring and quite unimaginative management of the agricultural sector that we have been constrained to witness thus far.

3. We must immediately set about making agriculture a compulsory priority across all tiers of government and our government and party must insist that no one pays lip service to it.

4. If we can allocate ?90b for Hajj, then even ?900b is way too small for agriculture at the federal level and we must do far better than we are currently doing unless we are only deceiving ourselves.

5. The same budgetary prioritisation of agriculture should be replicated across the states and local governments.

6. Our government and party must insist on holistic execution of the agricultural budget in line with the goals of our President’s Renewed Hope Agenda.

NOTE: We have 200 million plus people to feed in this country and we would only be heading into a food crisis of cataclysmic proportions unless we immediately overhaul the logic underpinning our overall approach to feeding this nation.

POSTSCRIPT
Even if food prices prove difficult to considerably reduce, at the very least, we must endeavour to stabilise them.

It is far easier for people to cope with high prices that remain stable over an extended period of time than to constantly be at their wits end grappling with prices some of which increase on a daily basis!

Such a situation is quite intolerable and simply unsustainable.

We can do better and must do better, and the time to start doing better is right now.

May God guide and protect President Bola Tinubu.

May God bless the All Progressives Congress, APC.

God bless Nigeria!

Onokpasa, a lawyer, writes from Abuja.