The African Democratic Congress has accused President Bola Tinubu’s administration of running out of ideas to tame the cost of food, arguing that the government’s focus on headline inflation figures ignores what ordinary Nigerians actually feel at the market.
National publicity secretary Bolaji Abdullahi said the party wants food security treated as a matter of national security, with immediate steps to lower input, energy and transport costs, tighten security for farmers, build strategic food reserves, and set measurable goals aimed at one outcome: making sure Nigerians can afford to eat and farmers can make a living.
The party pointed to the National Bureau of Statistics figures showing headline inflation easing slightly from 15.91 percent in June to 15.43 percent in July, arguing that the celebration around that number obscures a harsher reality. Food inflation, by contrast, jumped from 17.52 percent to 20.31 percent year on year over the same period, and rose from 3.75 percent to 5.56 percent month on month, a pace the party says translated into food prices for staples such as rice, tomatoes, onions, pepper, beef, eggs and garri climbing sharply in July alone.
Abdullahi linked the numbers to earlier findings from the Food and Agriculture Organisation that some 35 million Nigerians face acute food insecurity, with malnutrition threatening large numbers of children. He called it insensitive for the government to tout economic progress while so many Nigerians go hungry, and challenged officials to explain why affording food keeps getting harder if the reforms are truly working. Rather than more claims that conditions are improving, he said, Nigerians deserve an honest reckoning with the limits of the current approach.
The party laid out its own five point plan: replacing scattered interventions with an integrated national strategy focused on staple foods; directly tackling the cost of fertiliser, seed, machinery, diesel, transport and finance that drives up farming costs; treating the safety of farmers and farming communities as central to food policy, since inputs mean little if insecurity keeps farmers off their land; fixing the high cost of moving food from farm to market by addressing transport, roads, insecurity and multiple levies; and setting up a transparent national food reserve able to release staples when prices spike and buy from farmers when prices collapse, protecting both sides of the market.
Abdullahi said the government may point to falling headline inflation as proof its reforms are working, but Nigerians are watching a different number, the price of food, and it is government’s job to close that gap rather than explain it away.
