Floods, food shortages threaten to push Nigeria into food crisis

Mal Shehu Ladan took a boat across what was, until this month, a growing rice paddy. Now, like thousands of hectares of rice in Nigeria's Kebbi state, it is under water.

"Almost all my farm has been flooded. I didn't harvest any rice," Ladan told Reuters News Agency. "It's going to be devastating."

Floods early this month across northwest Nigeria destroyed 90 percent of the two million tonnes that Kebbi state officials expected to harvest this autumn, the head of the state branch of the Rice Farmers Association of Nigeria told Reuters. The loss amounts to some 20 percent of the rice Nigeria grew last year, and the waters are still rising.

Further south, outside Nigeria's capital, Abuja, chicken farmer Hippolite Adigwe is also worried. A shortage of maize forced him to sell most of his flock of more than 1,000 birds, and the 300 he has left are hungry. Chicken feed prices have more than doubled, and he is not sure how long he can cope.

Twin crises, floods and maize shortages, come just after movement restrictions and financing difficulties caused by COVID-19 containment measures complicated spring planting.

Some farmers and economists said it could push Nigeria, Africa's most populous nation, into a food crisis. Rice is the country's staple grain, and chicken is a core protein.

"There is a real fear of having food shortages," Arc Kabir Ibrahim, president of the All Farmers Association of Nigeria told Reuters. "The effect on the food system is going to be colossal."

Nigeria took roughly 4,000 tonnes of millet and sorghum from the regional economic bloc's (ECOWAS) strategic stocks last month and released 30,000 tonnes of its own maize. It also gave four companies special permission to import maize.

The prominent Nigerian Economic Summit Group has called for "a complete overhaul" of agriculture policy.

Problems accessing foreign exchange to import food are adding to shortages. In July, the central bank added maize to a list of items for which importers are banned from using its dollars. Rice and fertiliser were already on the list, along with other items that Nigeria wants to be made locally.

Last week, even as food prices spiked, President Muhammadu Buhari promised that not one cent of central bank dollars would go to food or fertiliser imports, as Nigeria would continue encouraging local farmers over imports.

Importers can use dollars from pricier parallel markets. But these are tough to find due to an oil price crash that has cut Nigeria's core source of foreign exchange.

Switching grains

Rice prices had already risen substantially due to a land border closure last year that aimed to stamp out smuggling and boost local production.

Peter Clubb of the International Grains Council said the spike drove consumers to eat maize instead. This, along with a disappointing crop late last year and the foreign exchange issues, boosted maize prices to 180,000 naira ($470) per tonne from approximately 70,000 naira ($183) in March.

Farmers sid that consumers grappling with inflation, as well as the first rise in fuel prices since 2016 and a power price spike, can only pay so much more for food.

Ayodeji Balogun, chief executive at commodities exchange Afex, said the central bank's lending scheme for farmers has significantly expanded output, and can work long term.

But the coming months will be tough. Fertiliser prices hit a record after a COVID-19 outbreak shut down country's sole urea plant for two weeks, meaning more farmers will skip fertilisers, limiting crop yields.

"The worst is yet to happen," Balogun said. "It is a problem across grains."

Buhari has pledged more support, and Agriculture Minister Muhammed Sabo Nanono visited the northwest area this weekend and promised to provide farmers with high-quality seeds and to set up a special committee to ensure they have all they need to plant new crops as soon as possible.

Adigwe, the chicken farmer, said he thinks barring foreign food in order to help farmers is not a bad idea, but "there are some factors that were not considered."

"Can local production sustain the population of Nigeria?"


Al Jazeera

Nigerian doctors suspend strike to allow government time to meet demands

Nigerian resident doctors on Thursday suspended a strike to allow the government time to meet its demands over pay and working conditions amid the spread of the coronavirus, the head of the doctors’ union said.

The National Association of Resident Doctors resolved to suspend the strike “to give government time to address our demands,” said Aliyu Sokomba, president of the union, in a WhatsApp message to Reuters.

The strike began on Monday, and included 16,000 resident doctors out of a total of 42,000 doctors in the country, including those who worked in COVID-19 treatment centres, he had said earlier this week.

Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, has more than 55,000 confirmed coronavirus infections and more than 1,000 deaths.

Resident doctors are medical school graduates training as specialists. They are pivotal to frontline healthcare in Nigeria as they dominate the emergency wards in its hospitals.

The union last went on strike in June, demanding better benefits and more protective equipment for battling coronavirus. They are still demanding, among other things, life insurance and hazard allowances.

A labour ministry statement earlier this week said the government had spent 20 billion naira ($52.53 million) on hazard allowances for healthcare workers in April, May and June, and had met the bulk of the doctors’ demands.


Reuters

Video - What’s being done to keep learning going in northern Nigeria?

In observance of the first-ever ‘International Day to Protect Education from Attack’ on 9 September, The Stream is partnering with Witness to discuss a new documentary on the subject. Ahmad the Architect follows Ahmad Buba, a man on a mission to help his native Nigeria undo the harm caused by Boko Haram, an armed group that doesn’t believe in Western education, and for more than a decade has bombed schools, killed teachers and kidnapped students. The film focuses on Ahmad’s efforts to build twenty four boarding schools for orphans of the violence and fourteen mosques. According to UNICEF, the attendance rate in Northern Nigeria is roughly 53 percent. While Boko Haram is largely to blame for the lack of education, various other factors play into the abandonment of learning including lower value on the education of girls, joblessness and drug use. In this episode of The Stream, we discuss the efforts to fix Nigeria’s debilitated education system and efforts to revive the schools.

Nigerian men arrested over German PPE 'scam

 Two Nigerian men have been arrested for allegedly scamming a German state that tried to buy 2.3m euros (£2m) of personal protective equipment (PPE).

Nigerian police say they cloned the website of a Dutch company to obtain an order from the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia.

When the PPE didn't show up, a state government representative visited the company's offices in the Netherlands.

The company then informed him that they had never done business with him.

The representative notified the Dutch police and investigations led to Nigeria where the two suspects were arrested in the commercial capital, Lagos. They are due to appear in court soon.

The suspects, Babatunde Adesanya and Akinpelu Hassan Abass, were members of a "sophisticated transnational criminal network", Nigerian police said in a statement.

The pair allegedly cloned the corporate website of ILBN Holdings BV in order to carry out the scam on Freiherr Fredrick Von Hahn, who represented North Rhine-Westphalia. The PPE was needed for the battle against coronavirus.

Two more arrests have also been made in the Netherlands.

According to Nigerian police, Mr Von Hahn was "disturbed" when the PPE did not arrive, only to find out that "the company never did business with him and that the transaction was a scam".

BBC

Mathematics teacher in Nigeria uses social media to ‘teach the whole world’

For many 12th graders, the closure of Nigeria’s public schools to combat the spread of COVID-19 presents a particular problem: How to prepare for crucial, final exams?

Basirat Olamide Ajayi, a math teacher in Lagos, Nigeria’s biggest city, came up with a solution. She began offering free mathematics classes online via Twitter, WhatsApp and Instagram. And now, after almost six months, more than 1,800 students at various levels are taking her classes -- across Nigeria and even internationally.

Students watch her short math videos -- no more than 5 minutes long -- and respond to her questions. She will send them homework, and occasional assignments. And she grades them.

“Sometimes, I stay awake till 2 a.m. going through their assignments!” she said.

“COVID is here with both negative and positive impacts. The positive impact is that we can use technology to teach our students, which I am very, very happy about,” she said.

When Ajayi, 36, started her online classes, she solved math problems on camera on white sheets of paper. Then a parent saw how she was conducting the class and donated a whiteboard.

Her free classes are attracting students from all over Nigeria, and now students abroad are joining. A recent request came from Canada.

Ajayi says she is beginning to see herself as a global teacher.

“The online teaching has made me feel that I can actually teach the whole world mathematics,” she said. “On Twitter people see me all over the world, not only in Lagos, not only in Nigeria. They see me all over the world and that is enough to give me innermost joy.”

But not all students in Nigeria have easy access to her lessons.

“Some of them don’t even have data to access the class, and that is not giving me joy at all, as a teacher that wants students to be online,” she said. Ajayi said she pays for data for some of the students from her own pocket to allow them to be online.

Some students don’t even have phones; Ajayi encourages parents to share their phones.

Fortune Declan, 17, said Ajayi has made it easier for him to grasp mathematics.

“Originally when I started learning differentiation on my own it was kind of twitchy,” he said. “But when I joined the online maths platform, I started slow at first, but with the way my maths teacher was teaching, holding the sessions, I started learning differentiation rapidly.”

Her dedication is noteworthy, said Adedoyin Adesina, chairman of the Lagos arm of the Nigerian Union of Teachers.

“Teaching students virtually was a new experience to everybody,” he said. “There is the problem of slow internet, the cost of data and the uncooperative attitude of parents who were not familiar with what teachers are doing.”

Faced with the new challenges, Ajayi has shown real dedication, he said, especially as “she was not provided with money, data or any teaching material.”

Although she misses being in the classroom, Ahayi said she is gratified to be helping so many students: “The more I give, the more society will benefit from me and people can say ‘Mrs. Ajayi has done this to the whole world.’”


Hindustan Times