By BASHIR ADEFAKA
“In Saudi Arabia, the common policy by both government and people in the market is that, “Anything we produce in our country must be the cheapest.” That is why a price regime continues to operate in the Kingdom, no matter the number of years. Not in Nigeria. Prices of food grown in the country increase every day and does not go down. So sad! Only the Federal Government can act in defence of the masses here.”
I have observed in my day-to-day experience in life, as an ordinary citizen that, one needs to mix with others particularly the downtrodden to enable him see things and know where the shoe pinches the people. Sometimes what the people need, even when it is exactly what is provided to them, once the rights of access to those provided needs are not defended and protected by authorities, it will always look like nothing is being done.
There is no doubt in my mind that Nigeria, currently, has produced enough food to cater for its population but it is also right that the quantity of commodity appears insufficient because of the activities not just of middlemen but a deliberately established cartel, sabotaging equal distribution process of those items to the reach of all and at affordable prices.
Market is supposed to be a unifying centre where the rich and the poor buy without anyone separating between the two. Prices therefore is at minimally affordable and only then, even the rich can enjoy his riches. The sabotage begins when marketers begin to separate markets between the rich and the poor. Just like education, there was a time in Nigeria when children of state leaders and business executives attended the same schools with children even of the poor. Moment segregation came, the haste of the poor to meet up where he cannot reach leads to ritual killings.
The duty to defend and protect the rights of access to what has been produced of food security is a need that should come with achievements. Government leaders at all levels should take note of this, especially Federal Government.
This is a very important area of need that is lacking. Some people, who are opportune to be in charge of marketing the commodity produced to boost food security in this country, just make up their minds not to let the things get to the right beneficiaries or consumers, hence the hardship in the land. Only the Federal Government can provide that needed duty of defending and protecting people’s access to the good things of life that it has provided and continues to provide for them.
The government, however, can have its portion of the blame when enforcement of laws to get that duty felt in the living system of the people is not handled properly. But when this is properly done, people will be happy and peace will reign. Enforcing the laws properly is making life miserable for saboteurs making access to good living difficult for the generality of the people.
The evil that ordinary man, particularly in the market and transport sectors, does to fellow country man is unquantifiable. As a living witness, I have watched front, right, left and centre and have, therefore, discovered that, except the Federal Government itself descends on perpetrators of these social vices, the common man can helplessly not be able to stop them and, if something quick is not done in time by the highest authorities, God forbids that we may begin to witness situation where innocent citizens start dropping dead one after another, due to frustrations that will result from hopelessness. Or what does anyone think can happen, if an able body and hardworking citizen works and yet earns little or nothing and, even while still continuing in working hard hoping that one day things will get better, some wicked souls come forcing illegal taxes on him in the name of market place governance? By who? One Iya Isale (area mother in the market). Authorized by who? Council or even political leaders at state level as it is the case in Lagos. What does one expect in that kind of situation? Frustration, of course!
Federal Government must know by now that the hardship, which people cry about in particularly Southern part of the country, is artificial, therefore, and should rise to the challenge to address the problem of masses’ inability to overcome evils perpetrated against them by fellow citizens using political power to persecute and subject them to hardship.
This is the first stage of needs assessment that should be well identified and acted upon. The people, first and foremost, need a defender, which can only be the Federal Government, to defend them against those evil doers and also further protect them against their misdeeds thereafter. Then, whatever performance that is achieved by government in the area of security, agriculture and even minimum wage at that time can have positive effect. It will always be to the good of the people and citizens will have lasting peace with themselves and they will love their government leaders and country. It is not as if evil ones get finished, but their efforts will no longer be able to overrun the entire populace once there is full commitment to people’s rights defence and protection by government.
I recall a reported comment by Major General Adekunle Abdullahi Martins, former Commander, Nigerian Army Ordnance Corps, when he asked the Federal Government to take the economy of Lagos State, upon which other economies in the country depend, to its heart, else, if it pays N300,000 minimum wage, Nigerians will still cry of hardship. He said huge amount of minimum wage at that time will fail to stop the cries of hardship and hunger in the land because, such economy is left to the control of hoodlums, especially who control the transport and market sectors in the nation’s economic nerve centre. He said there is no nation or state community that hands control of its transport and market sector to hoodlums that ever survived.
If those who have powers to help but do not know what obtains in these Lagos market and transport sectors as people complain, this is the problem. Every member of the market from pepper seller to grinder and even ‘pure water’ hawker is forced to join association. Those forcing them use cultism as well as other fetish means to drive their membership registration process. And, in some cases, they resort to physical threats and attacks in effort to intimidate the other man, who just wants to come to the market to sell, make his daily living and leave for home to return the next day.
These traders’ associations are the ones who dictate prices of items, even when the seller or service technician is comfortable with earning what is moderately less, the association people want him to charge higher. It is the masses whose earnings are not even enough yet that bear the brunt, hence the cry of hardship in the land. But this seems to be okay to so many politicians. They see it as opportunity to use the “cry of hardship in the land” – added with insecurity that, in most cases, the touts they breed and equip with dangerous weapons perpetrate – as political tool for getting to power. Manipulating human lives for political reasons! Serious!
For example, go to any barber shop anywhere in Lagos, especially on the mainland or the hinterland namely Ikeja, Ojota, Alagbado, Agege, Ikorodu, and so on and so forth, you see a card hung on the wall and with inscriptions: “Hair Cut Charges: Adult – N400, children – N300, etc”. At the bottom of the inscription, they put a spell (or do I say ‘curse’?) to say if any member does abide by these charges, this or that will be the repercussion. That is their fetish way to confuse or force association member to fall for their charges dictation, for any member without faith and knowledge that whoever has God needs not to fear the devil. This has resulted in why many people now decide to do their haircut by themselves at home and so some barbers lose customers. Good enough, I have a barber, who merely hangs that card but has always done his haircut as normal as N300 for Adult and N150 for children.
In the market or in the street, there is an Iyaloja in the area, who has stationed and uses touts to extort money from anyone that either hawks or sits selling in the market and this is done in very unpleasant manner. Sometimes ago in Oshodi, by Brown Junction, a bread hawker had her items thrown away by a tout because she had not made sale to pay the morning N100 tax in time. They collect it in the morning and afternoon. What is an individual’s profit on a petty trade of N2,000 – highest – in capital that they are forced to pay tax morning and afternoon? Where in the law of doing business in Nigeria or any state of the country that makes such extortion lawful?
But it happens and even political leaders in government at either state or local government level, particularly in Lagos and partly Ogun states, see these evils and do like they do not see. The same people, whose votes (?) brought them to power to be defender and protected against insecurity, either caused by political, social or economic reasons, these political leaders leave them alone to their own dilemma. So worse that if a tout in such situation as seen in Lagos is reported at police station, many complaints we have had showed that he will be the one to be freed while even the complainant won’t go free. This also builds serious enmity from members of public against the police officers. Politicians endangering the lives of even security agents!
It is sad! I witnessed one at Agege, under the newly constructed bridge that should have made lives easy for the people, the tout threatened to stab the malam selling oranges and I waited and studied everything. I then approached a woman that I saw was also backing him and asked: “Why?” She replied me politely, though, saying, “We were invited to Iddo yesterday and were told that this money we must collect and remit”. She did not tell me who invited them to Iddo. It means that in Lagos, even that that do this extortion have hierarchy that is perpetrating the generation of heat to lives of people in Nigeria’s supposedly economic nerve centre.
It is a common knowledge that when we were made to accept that Nigerian rice was too expensive at N22,000 and the best like King Bull and Stallion N24,000, they brought those they called imported rice. We all knew that there was an order that made and still makes importation or smuggling of rice into the country through land borders illegal. But they bring these things in and people, because of their impatience, believing what they are made to believed to be expensive Nigerian rice, rushed into patronizing those smuggled rice. They always have the impression that there is no other food that Nigerians can eat except rice whereas, Nigerians eat yam, potatoes, semovita, spaggetti, noddles, garri, wheats, amala, and from yam they make pounded yam. All of these are produced locally in Nigeria. But because they have to cause themselves a huge problem, they join in the rush for smuggled rice and then they are given in a very hard way.
I have information about how some unpatriotic customs and police officers allow these smuggled rice to get into the country – not a matter of today. They started selling the smuggled rice at N15,000 then N27,000 then N18,000 then N20,000. It was understandable that they did not want to be caught with imported rice and so, they sold them off at cheaper rates, they claimed. Gradually, as they began to realize that some easily deceived Nigerians were getting carried away by their antics, they increased it to N22,000 then N24,000 then N26,000 and now it is N29,000. Smuggled rice! And then when you ask them “why?” They say because the road is hard for them to bring in rice into the country from Cotonou, the Republic of Benin. At that point, you even have some of these Nigerians joining them in abusing the government: “Which food has the government produced for us to buy that they are blocking rice from being brought into the country from Cotonou?” They said more, so much that in event that those smugglers kill customs officers they consider to be stumbling blocks on their way, some of these Nigerians applaud them. Very sad!
In the first instance, when has it ever been made legal for anyone to bring in rice into the country through the land borders that some citizens would be joining illegal importers in abusing the government for implementing a policy for general good? The policy simply says money paid by those smugglers to developing the economy of neighbouring country should rather be redirected into developing the economy of their own country, which is still the final destination of the goods they import and which first land in Cotonou but smuggled into Nigeria forcefully. And because they do not want to sacrifice anything for a day that their country may get things right in order for them to enjoy for days longer after, they defend the illegal smugglers saying, “If you don’t want us to eat imported rice, what has your government produced?”
The question is, despite all of the smuggled foreign rice they claim have been their saviours, have they ever stopped crying of hunger? Has their hardship ceased to bite them? No. Is it not so pathetic?
It is pathetic because, these Nigerians fail to realize that it is not as if the rice is not being made available by farmers of their own country, who are well funded by the Federal (not state) Government, but because there are some elements, marketers, who sabotage their access to the commodity at better prices. It takes a patriotic mind to realise this truth but everybody just want to agitate and in agitating they shoot themselves more in the foot. There has been no proof that Hausa-Fulani race is the problem of Nigeria. That is what their agitation has led them to. No President of Southern Nigeria has grown food security and infrastructure like the Northerner currently in power has done in the last six years.
Instead, therefore, for the people to opt for supporting smugglers and are part of those that make life difficult for them, they should have better cried to government to help them fight those elements – be they middlemen or whoever that are making cost of living so high, making life difficult and making their earnings always inadequate in their country. It is only in Nigeria that any slight change in foreign exchange is used to justify why prices of food varieties grown in their own land must be increased.
In Saudi Arabia, the common policy by both government and people in the market is that, “Anything we produce in our country must be the cheapest.” That is why a price regime continues to operate in the Kingdom, no matter the number of years. Not in Nigeria. Prices of food grown in the country increase every day and does not go down. So sad! Only the Federal Government can act in defence of the masses here.
With Abuja Rice Pyramids now as a result of which paddy rice have been distributed to millers in order to crash prices of food in the Nigerian markets, those who cry that there is no food in Nigeria and that government does nothing about it have since gone underground and are no longer talking because they know that the truth, which they helped hide for the mischief makers they support to thrive, has now come to the open without anybody being able to block it anymore. So, there is food in Nigeria.
But why are food items so expensive, even if the law of demand and supply is to be applied? The economist says it is only when there is shortage in quantity of supply (scarcity) that the price of commodity is affected upward. “The lower the supply the higher the price of quantity demanded”, the economist says. But where you have supply in abundance, demand naturally goes lower and in that case price of commodity crashes to the enjoyment of the common man.
In the current situation, as experienced in Lagos market, there is a cartel of marketers, who always do not want crash of market prices. They are always interested in earning more money without displaying the feeling that they know the implication of earning more money at less value in the socio-economic life of a society. So, they embark on artificial creation of scarcity either by hoarding or dwindling the supply chain from the warehouse to put pressure on demand, so that price will always go up. For instance, if there are five warehouses, they make only two to open for supply so that wholesalers, who come to buy for onward trans-trade to retailers resort to panic buying.
What I also find out is, because of this evil way of playing politics with even food security in the land, which man needs to survive, that these marketers device, they even make things difficult for most wholesalers to reach directly to them. Then you find out that the normal supply chain of Producer/Warehouse-Wholesale-Retailer-Consumer that we used to know has now been expanded to Producer/Warehouse-Wholesale1-Wholesale2-Wholesale3-Retailer-Consumer. This is a very serious case!
You now have a situation where instead for all wholesalers/distributors to get to the producers/warehouses to buy goods for onward sales to retailers, who then finally sell to the final users that is the consumers, warehouses are no longer meant to be accessible to all wholesalers and so you have another level of wholesalers (three-level) that is not recognized to Economics. Then wholesalers1 go to the producers/warehouses to buy, wholesalers2 buy from them and sell to wholesalers3 who then go on to sell to retailers and then before the commodity finally gets to the final consumers or users, the price is already too much on the high side. This is the result of my investigation about why and how prices of items in the market are too much on the high side thereby making the cost of living so high in Nigeria today. All is not and cannot be because of electricity or forex.
The only place that things are easier and cheaper is the North, yet they are the ones who do not go to school as claim in the South. Even there are some items sold in the North that are still influenced by determination of price from Lagos.
At this point, there is nothing any ordinary citizen can do to stop these evils that man does to man except that the Federal Government comes to task and stop the people in the society, who are so heartless that they have no mercy at wanting to get extremely rich at all cost minding not, whether their quest for getting extremely rich runs some people down to being extremely poor to stupor or not. Only the Federal Government can stop these evil merchants because, investigations further showed that, the evils that these heartless marketers perpetrate are means by which the political leaders in government at state level empower them as reward for supporting them during elections.
*Bashir Adefaka is Lagos-based Journalist, publisher and media and publicity consultant. Reach him via his email: omope72@gmail.com or 08163323906 (text only).
