All Hail The Giant

If you go to local markets frequently, and you have been to the market in the last few days, the spike in the price of some commodities would have shocked you the way it shocked me the last time I was at a market. Tomatoes most especially doubled in price in the space of one week. We know that inflation has been on the increase in the last one year or so but the hike in the last one week has been nothing short of astonishing.?

For a country that has a huge potential to thrive on agriculture, the level of food insecurity has most surely stunned even the most adept of economists because they likely did not see this scale of inflation coming. To put that into perspective, between January and March 2021, agriculture contributed to 22.35 percent of the total Gross Domestic Product of the country. Meaning that more than one-fifth of the market value of the finished products within the country came from agriculture alone.?

After petroleum, agriculture is another very important part of our economy. It engages more than half of the population, with many of them being rural dwellers, and it focuses more on providing food for the domestic market. With hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of arable land covering the length and breadth of the nation, it is quite disappointing that agriculture has still not gone beyond the subsistence level. With hundreds of kilometers of coastline and thousands of square kilometers of inland water, the aquaculture industry is still struggling to measure up to the level of fish consumption in the land.

Despite the contribution of agriculture to the economy, the sector is burdened with many challenges which impact heavily on its productivity. Apart from climate change and the inevitable land degradation that comes with continuous use, the major issue that farmers have to contend with is active and passive government impact. From poor land tenure system to high production cost to limited financing to poor distribution network to outright disinterest from government, farmers have been largely left on their own to fend for themselves and make their efforts productive. Over 70 percent of Nigerians engage in the agriculture sector mainly at a subsistence level. Meaning that people only farmed just to eat. Very little of the contribution from agriculture added up to our wealth as a nation.

Dozens of other countries around the world are many times smaller in land mass and population, but have found a way to not only make their agriculture sustain the population, but can also afford to export their farm proceeds to attract foreign exchange. The sad part is that many of the individuals occupying influential positions have seen how well these countries optimize their resources to amplify their farmers’ efforts. But are these influential people in Nigeria doing anything? No. The priority now is to change the current anthem to an old one simply because the wordings of the old one appear better than the wordings of the current one. There are 4 countries in the world whose anthems do not have official lyrics as a national anthem so the confusing part is how the lyrics of the new national anthem is supposed to stop the galloping inflation or improve the depreciating living standards across the social levels of the masses.?

The labour union just instituted an industrial action because the government has been delaying the implementation of the minimum wage for workers. Ironically, the matter of the new old national anthem became law even before most Nigerians heard of the plans to change the anthem so it is a lie that matters cannot be decided quickly in the chambers. Maybe, just maybe if they had allocated the same nonchalant attitude towards the anthem change, it may have been accepted that they generally are slow to address issues. But there has been a pattern that frivolous, economically irrelevant issues are attended to in super quick time and pressing issues are almost never discussed, let alone given priority.?

Interestingly, the agency that is supposed to be in charge of creating awareness and engaging Nigerians on government policies, programmes and activities has not created any awareness around the new old anthem, nor has it engaged the populace in any positive or encouraging way. But that matter is not for discussion in this article. A few years ago, Nigeria's economy overtook that of South Africa and it began to look like Nigeria was finally starting to live up to its name as the giant on the continent but not only has the giant lost that position, it has slipped to fourth place behind South Africa, Egypt and Algeria. The population of those three countries added together is still behind the population of Nigeria.

It is evident that this giant has not really lived up to its name and has continually failed to carry that tag like it should. The truth is, we know exactly what we are doing wrong and we have done everything to course-correct but the exact thing that will fix the downward slide. Hopefully, the time will come when the people with the actual influence will wake up and use their influence decisively. But till then, let us try not to be horrified by the show of shame that we are regularly served.