Today, many Nigerians are hungry mainly because the nation’s major food supply lines have been strategically destroyed by Boko Haram and myriads of other insurgent elements marauding large swaths of lands that traditionally constitute the nation’s food basket. A major element in contemporary strategic planning all over the world is the concept of Food Security.
It is always a priority item on the policy agenda of war-time leaders, ancient and modern, as they assiduously formulate their national security strategy calculus because they all know that a country that cannot feed her people cannot be said to be truly sovereign, much less, capable of winning long-drawn wars, whether domestic or foreign.
Formal juristic sovereignty is ultimately nothing if it does not encompass food sovereignty which is globally defined as “the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems.” To the extent that we have lost the capacity to feed ourselves, the Nigerian State and the governments that service it have also lost a substantial part of their legitimacy, at least, the moral integrity required to stand up to be counted as a credible repository of national order, peace and happiness devoid of hunger, hopelessness and starvation.
As things stand today, the much-touted Renewed Hope Agenda of the present administration is being undermined by the massive hunger and hopelessness currently overwhelming the land which is further worsened by the accelerated diminution in the capacity of the country to produce what she eats. For years, we have warned the various administrations that the Boko Haram insurgents’ High Command is pursuing the devastating strategic goal of stiffening the food supply lines of Nigeria to a point where ensnared citizens would actually be fighting the war on their behalf due to extreme hunger.
Today, that horrible scepter is almost with us as some ill-informed Nigerians, out of sheer hunger, would rather prefer a Boko Haram’s Taliban-like brutal theocracy with food on their tables than the so-called elected democratic government that cannot feed them even though such a frustration-driven option would only lead them to greater regrets down the road, just the same way that the inhabitants of Gaza who once enthusiastically welcome gun-toting Hamas fighters into their streets are now telling horrible tales of unquantifiable immiseration.
It should therefore be clear to anyone with strategic insight into modern governance that the idea of moving defenseless citizens who are victims of sectarian and communal attacks into camps in which they thoughtlessly tagged “Internally Displaced Persons” (IDP) camps instead of militarily warding off those attackers once and for all, was a stupid policy choice that only signals an uncanny readiness by those in charge of the nation’s security to capitulate lazily.
It is, no doubt, a strategic victory for the insurgents because evacuating the farming population instead of defending them and making them safe and secure in their homelands was a direct degradation of Nigeria’s capacity to farm and produce the food necessary for her survival, much less, winning a raging war.
The inflation currently ravaging the economy would have been a lot more tolerable if the ordinary man is still able to meet his daily food requirements. Instead, Nigerian households are now spending all their resources on food because there are not enough farmers anymore as they are all languishing in the various IDP camps. In any case, a hungry man is an angry and edgy man to whom the nation’s social order is nothing but chaos, agony and pains. We saw that reality violently manifesting itself recently during the nation-wide mass protests against hunger and general poverty ravaging the land which are directly traceable to the various ill-processed and poorly executed government economic reform policies without a human face.
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It is instructive to note that when the Constitution proclaims that the security and welfare of the citizens shall be the primary responsibility of government, it actually means more than the physical protection offered through the instrumentalities of the State security apparati; it also extends to the policy and practical assurances of sufficient and adequate nourishment for the people through the consumption of the right quantity and quality of food needed for the proper development of both their mind and body.
Just as no family could be properly described as contented if the head of the household is unable to provide them with food, a government with a starving population would expect to contend with a disgruntled citizenry. So, from whatever angle one looks at the matter, the guarantee of regular food supply is one of the highest forms of substantive security.
It would therefore not be out of place, if the government immediately makes the proper feeding of the citizens its utmost priority. Especially for a country like Nigeria that is abundantly blessed with fertile arable lands, the question of guaranteed access to food should be taken as settled because everything that is required to produce food at great quantity and quality is in abundant supply throughout the country. The green portion of our national flag speaks eloquently about this potential abundance.
Problems started when cheap petrol-dollars began rushing into the nation’s treasury during the reign of juntas that had no meaningful idea about national planning or schematic thoughts about the future. Nigeria became afflicted with a debilitating “siesta syndrome” wherein we could just sit by lazily and import anything imaginable, including foods because we had inexhaustible foreign exchange in the coffers: The Americans, Europeans, the Brazilians and lately, South Africans, were doing the farming while we were foolishly eating their produce. In economic terms, we were prodigiously depleting our treasury while they were wisely augmenting theirs at our expense.
In this regard, the Tinubu government has a big task on its hands. The present “palliative” response to the troubling food question is still very much in line with the primitive agrarian philosophy of yore where all that one needs to produce is whatever he or she requires for his daily existence. That is a completely outdated concept; adequate food production should be an integrated part of our national security plan. A nation that has no strategic food supply mechanism in place has no realistic preparedness for winning a war even one against a rag-tag army of savannah dwelling urchins, drugs and religiously inebriated AK-47 wielding marauders.
Flying across the country, what you see is a limitless canopy of untapped lush green vegetation lying fallow below. Our agricultural goal should be to transform Nigeria into a food exporting nation but that would entail the immediate abandonment of the current lacklustre attitude, which focuses on merely being able to feed seasonally. Agriculture is the only productive area where Nigeria can reasonably exploit comparative advantage in international trade at the moment.
As far as many observers of the current Nigerian war against the insurgents are concerned, the insurgents currently have the strategic edge in the encounter to the extent that they have been able to demoralize the Nigerian population through hunger and have actually turned a segment of them against the government. That hunger is a tool of war is a fact which occupies significant spaces in the history of warfare and the acute food situation in Nigeria right now has amply justified the theory which posits that inflicting food insecurity on your enemy is a tactical short-cut to victory and whoever can disable his enemy in this regard will likely have a prominent seat at the rendezvous of victory.
In the present case of Nigeria, unless the food crisis is urgently resolved by having the IDPs emptied out and the people assuredly restored to their farmland in peace and security to resume their regular lives as farmers immediately, all the noise from the security authorities about being “on top of the situation” may just be like statements made by idiots that are reputedly, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
*Prof Ikhariale, a constitutional lawyer, is a columnist in the Daily Independent
