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OPINION: Rough rice, rotten yams and Abuja mess

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OPINION: Buhari’s presidency at Nigeria’s expense [1]

IT appeared like a thief in the night in a soulless city peopled mostly by mammon. No. There are many good people in that city but the trouble is that that town appears to be perpetually oiled and driven by money. And more money. Stolen money really. It’s hotels are expensive including the seedy ones. The house rents are prohibitive. Parks which serve everything, almost everything, under the sun but which open only in the night dot almost every open space. The prices of the spicy delicacies they offer can cause hypertension for those who are not well- heeled. And drive them to join the wagon of thieves. And the majority of the residents of that city are in the struggling class but the picture is masked by the presence of the obscenely rich, not wealthy, few who throw money about with reckless abandon. That city hosts the Presidency and the ministries and their ministers. It also hosts the government departments and agencies and their directors-general, permanent secretaries and sundry directors. It is home to the famous or notorious, depending on where you stand, national assembly and the senators and representatives whose salaries are known but whose vulgar allowances are steeped in mystery and subject of unending controversies.

That city, I mean Abuja, which is ensconced inside the Federal Capital Territory [FCT], also hosts the Supreme Court which now often delivers opinions, rulings, decisions and judgments that are befuddling and jaw- dropping. The diplomatic missions and private businesses and political parties’ head offices are not left out in the mad rush to identify with that soulless town. In this category, some relocate to Abuja of their own volition while others are compelled by government to move to that town. So the city is crowded, congested, ugly and displaying signs of an inevitable slum. And in the context of today’s Nigeria, Abuja competes with no other capital as the headquarters of corruption. You will be mistaken if your definition of corruption is limited to stealing of money, though that also thrives in the inner sanctum of government in Abuja.

It was this other variant of insidious corruption that was on display in bold relief on January 18, 2022 in Abuja. That day, it obviously happened overnight, bags of alleged rough otherwise called paddy rice, stacked in the form of pyramids sprung up in Abuja. The sight of the ‘famed’ pyramids built with unverified one million and two hundred thousand bags of rice startled Abuja residents that fateful January morning, and Nigerians when they were beamed on national television stations and streamed online. For some Nigerians especially regime apologists it was an exciting and a bold statement on the performance of the President, Maj-Gen. Muhammadu Buhari and the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) political party. But for many other Nigerians, the APC and their president were at their game again- the game of hoodwinking, propaganda, deceit, fraud and every other evil thing in-between. There were reasons for citizens’ cynicism and outright doubting of regime’s claims about its feat in local rice production and the subsequent pyramids in Abuja.

In 2017 the then Minister of Agriculture Audu Ogbeh was all over town boasting that Nigeria was primed to begin the export of yam tubers to Europe and the United States of America. And on June 29th or thereabout the first shipment of containers left the country through the Lagos ports. The excitement was palpable. And the regime was heady and bullish about the feat. But the shocker that followed soon after was a national embarrassment. The shock was exacerbated by the fact that our country was then recovering from the shame and loss of having almost 70 processed and semi processed food products of Nigerian origin rejected by the EU at the ports of entry in 2015 and 2016. Some of the food items that were turned back included brown and white beans, melon seeds, palm oil, mushrooms, bitter leaf, crayfish, groundnut and smoked fish. The rejection moved from Europe to the US. All 72 tonnes of yams that were exported to the US were flatly rejected and the consignments turned back. In Christendom the statement ‘Back to sender’ is a curse. The yams were found to be rotten on arrival. And to think that the Vice President, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo flagged off that export exercise in Lagos.

Read also: OPINION: Dariye, Nyame and that controversial state pardon

To be absolutely sure, the government was not the exporter of the rotten yams and there was no evidence that the yams were rotten before they left Lagos. But the government bears responsibility for the mess. For a start, there was a 1989 law banning the export of yam and there was no evidence that the law was amended or repealed before the export was undertaken. In other words, the government aided and abetted the breaking of law. Secondly, our choice was the export of fresh yam tubers not the chilled or dried varieties. And there lurks the danger. Our seaports are not programmed or structured to ensure seamless exports and imports. It reportedly took several weeks for the articulated trucks to inch their way to the ports to deliver the containerized tubers of yams. Then we have a retinue of untrained, compromised and corrupt government officials at the ports to contend with. Men of the Customs and Excise, Quality Control, Quarantine and the motley crowd at the ports would only be interested in lining their pockets not in inspecting and certifying the quality of the exports. In addition we have produce officers from the Ministry of Trade and Investments who appear to be more pre-occupied with mounting roadblocks on highways than any other job. The problem is compounded by the fact that in 2017 and probably up till today, the operating standard of our produce officers are still encoded in a 1959 pre-independence Ordinance. By the way, which other country in the world wakes up one morning and decrees the immediate exportation of agricultural produce without forethought, without plans, without organization and without putting the framework in place to protect the farmers and the image of the country apart from Nigeria?

This is what a regime does when it is driven and motivated by fraud, deceit and propaganda. Five years after the debacle of the export of yam, it is the turn of the pyramids of rice paddy in Abuja. It’s more than three months since what an opposition party described as ‘pyramids of lies’ in Abuja. The alleged one million and two hundred thousand bags of rough rice on display were supposed to be samples for the bags in the warehouses. I have asked questions about how long it takes to process rough rice for consumption. And nobody has told me it takes forever. In other words, the rice pyramids have played their part. They were not designed as part of a sustained and sustainable programme to ensure price reduction and affordability by suffering Nigerians. At the Abuja rice charade the claims by the regime in cahoots with the rice farmers association and the Central Bank of Nigeria are that Nigeria is virtually self sufficient in rice production, that there was sufficient processing or milling capacity, that prices would crash, and that plans were afoot to begin export of the grains. For now all the claims have turned out to be lies. And to cap the lies, a business newspaper reported on Sunday that millers said they were importing rough rice from neighbouring African countries to keep their mills busy. How a regime can contrive to lie to the people, not sometime, but all the time is difficult to imagine. The APC acceded to power in 2015 through lies and propaganda. It has governed by lies and deceit and propaganda for seven years. And it is still relentless.

We are in another election season. And some of the persons who appear to have vowed that there is nothing in Nigeria that they cannot mismanage or destroy are strutting about town canvassing for our votes ahead of the 2023 elections and promising to consolidate on the things they have mismanaged and the ones they have destroyed. This country is increasingly becoming unrecognizable. And an unfolding tragedy.

AUTHOR: Ugo Onuoha…


Articles published in our Graffiti section are strictly the opinion of the writers and do not represent the views of Ripples Nigeria or its editorial stand.

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