When a few years ago some crazy people started converting staple food items into bio-fuel, I knew that the world was heading for a very serious food crisis. I also knew that such a craze would lead to a multiplier effect which would be catastrophic to humanity. What the world is experiencing today is tantamount to the great holocaust that depleted the world’s population some 63 years ago. It can be equated also with the HIV/AIDS pandemic that has destroyed precious lives. Expectedly, as usual, the worst hit is Africa, nay Nigeria.

I have followed very diligently the opinions of experts on this global scourge and none has convinced me with any rational argument. Each commentator has kept running round and round the problem without proffering any functional solution.

The truth of the recent development is that mankind is threatened with extinction by its foolhardiness. How else could I describe such a hopeless and perilous situation? For those who know me I always like to call a spade a spade. I am born that way and will remain so till death.
Perhaps the Federal Government had a premonition of the impending calamity when President Yar’Adua ordered the release of grains from the national strategic grain reserve early this year to cushion the debilitating toll hunger was inflicting on hapless Nigerians.

I have sat back on a number of occasions to ruminate on the prevailing situation and all I got in each case was goose pimples. Imagine what will happen if the situation does not improve in the next three or four months? It is likely that people will start dropping dead in the streets.
Prices of food stuff have already hit the roof-tops while the greedy merchants are milking innocent Nigerians dry. A bag of rice which sold for N6000 early this year has jumped to N12000 with the likelihood of further rise in a few weeks. The same is applicable to the food for the common man such as garri, yam, vegetable oil, beans, beef and fish, etc.

My worry is that there is no concrete plan by the government to arrest the situation. Unlike what is obtainable in Europe, Asia and America, the situation in Africa, especially Nigeria is hopeless.

What Asia is doing to arrest the situation is to develop high-yielding rice. The expectation is that the yield will triple at harvest. This is quite interesting, no doubt. But what is Nigeria doing? This is my concern.

It is unfortunate that successive administrations at the federal level consigned agriculture to the backyard. For the 8 years of Obasanjo’s government billions of naira budgeted for agriculture went down the drains. I say so because there is nothing to show for the huge sums earmarked to boost food production. In fact, prices of food stuff reached its present height during the Obasanjo’s regime.

I have said it several times that Obasanjo did so much disservice to our fatherland. He led us on political gerrymandering for 8 good years without anybody batting the lid. Instead of encouraging wealthy entrepreneurs to undertake agricultural ventures he preferred to make billionaires out of them by assigning to them rich oil blocks and making them emergency oil merchants. Many of them are today NNPC contractors lifting oil at will.
I think there is a lesson for Yar’Adua in the story of Ali Baba and the 40 thieves. He should digest that story and in it he will see the personae it presents who are today managing the wealth of the nation.

The problem with our national life today is poor attitude to our civic duty by a people largely disoriented by the ills that plague our dear nation. Patriotism has been shoved into the trash can of history. And when patriotism is discussed, at all, it is discussed with robustness by the academia as a veritable topic in a political science class. Patriotism is now a topic for self-adulation.

The good thing about our nation is that it has a way of getting over its sordid past. No nation on the African Continent would suffer the kind of rape and pillaging that Nigeria had gone through and still exist. This is a nation that produces oil yet its citizens have no access to it. We are the sixth largest producer of oil in the world and 80 per cent of our people live in abject poverty and penury.

Annually, in the past five years, Nigeria’s budget has been in trillions yet a sizeable population of the people live below the poverty level. What justification do we have for the inability of government to provide us regular power supply, potable water, functional healthcare, quality education, good roads and security?
The other countries of the world are talking about how to conquer poverty at this point. But what Nigeria is talking about is how to combat hunger in addition to poor infrastructure. This is double wahala for dead body.

Where shall we go from here and “who will take to Edom as a sign that we own it?”
The problem of Nigeria has come to a stage that some drastic measures should be taken to save all of us from imminent death. Do we ever spare a thought for the generations that are not yet born? What kind of nation will we want to bequeath to them? Definitely not a ramshackle nation as we have it today.
The way Nigeria is now it can be likened to an endemically sick person, a cancer-stricken person, whose days are numbered. We are sitting on a keg of gunpowder waiting to explode.

We have another opportunity to reorder our priorities and chart a sustainable course for national advancement. We cannot afford to sit on the fence while the sun shines. We should work harder now in order to ensure a safer tomorrow.

This is where the president and his team come in. The federal government should declare an emergency in the food sector. When this is done it should involve the Organized Private Sector, particularly the banks and oil companies, to evolve a systematic agenda for addressing the current food crisis bedevilling our nation.
Again, the federal government should tinker with the idea of repatriating and reinvesting in agriculture a substantial part of the 60 billion US dollars in our foreign reserve. This has become imperative considering the emergency we have on our hands. Who are we accumulating the reserve for when the people are dying? Is it the dead that will profit from the reserve?

Government should also, as a matter of exigency, make special provisions in the monthly allocation for food production and massive strategic grains reserve. There is nothing wrong if the government can copy what Asia is doing to arrest the current food crisis facing the world.
Again, the government should look into the activities of companies that buy up large quantities of grains and other food stuff which they convert to other uses like bio-fuel, cosmetics, and livestock feeds.

Let me warn: unless something urgent is done to arrest hunger and poverty tormenting Nigerians there could be a revolution by the masses.
Remember a hungry man is an angry man. God forbid that we should perish!