Seventeen million hungry Nigerians is not a talking point invented by the opposition, the African Democratic Congress insists, it is a number straight from the United Nations World Food Programme, and the party is using it to accuse the Tinubu administration of engineering a humanitarian crisis through insecurity and poor economic policy.
In a statement from National Publicity Secretary Bolaji Abdullahi, the ADC cited WFP findings that more than 17 million Nigerians across nine conflict affected northern states are facing crisis, emergency or catastrophic levels of food insecurity, with over three million in Borno State alone and 6.2 million combined across Borno, Adamawa and Yobe. The party was pointed about the source, stressing these are not opposition figures or campaign slogans but findings from the world’s leading humanitarian agency on hunger, one that identified expanding insecurity, attacks on farming communities, mass displacement, restricted humanitarian access and declining support for vulnerable populations as the drivers behind the numbers.
The ADC laid the blame squarely on the administration’s failure to curb banditry and terrorism, arguing that the resulting displacement of farmers and falling agricultural output, combined with harsh economic policy, have pushed food further out of reach for millions, calling it the predictable result of a government that has failed to secure Nigerian lives, protect Nigerian farmers or address a cost of living crisis it created itself. The party also took aim at repeated government assurances that hardship would prove temporary, arguing the WFP findings simply confirm what Nigerians have been saying all along, that insecurity is spreading, food production is falling, inflation is worsening and millions are being pushed deeper into hunger.
