Nigerians are hungry because bandits keep murdering farmers —Ahmed, NNPP national chairman

The national chairman of the New Nigeria People’s Party (NNPP), Dr Ajuji Ahmed, speaks with TAOFEEK LAWAL on President Bola Tinubu’s speech on the heels of the nationwide protest against hardship, the fuel situation in the country, insecurity, food crisis and other salient issues.

President Bola Tinubu made a speech on Sunday appealing to Nigerians to stop the hardship protest. Do you think the president omitted anything in the speech that Nigerians wanted to hear?

There are a lot of analyses of that speech from many angles. I believe the speech lacked a lot of things which can indicate to Nigerians that there is hope at the end of the tunnel. He made the speech without any reference to how to reduce the cost of governance. And this cost of governance sees him having a record number of ministers, with record number of requests to the National Assembly to purchase a yacht and new aircraft and SUVs for senators and House of Representatives members. All these do not go without notice from the common man. And the common man will simply compare his state of being at any point in time with what he sees and hears as the income of the legislators, the pay packet attached to the office of the minister which really shows no connection with the ordinary man on the street.

The president should have addressed that squarely. He has no plan to tackle corruption and he knows that the issue of corruption is at the centre of these protests. But most remarkably, he did not announce anything that has to do with any hope to restore fuel subsidy. No reversal of subsidy removal and no strategy to mitigate the widespread hunger and deprivation that the subsidy removal has brought on the common people across the country. The speech provided no appeasement whatsoever to the protesters. I think he could have gone really far and deep to do that in order to show some empathy to those who are protesting and assure them that something is coming in terms of ameliorating the situation they are in. The masses are hungry and angry and he left them hungrier and angrier. And an angry man who is hungry is an unguarded missile.

If I were the president, I would have tried to empathise with those who find themselves in the situation. Whatever his advisers are telling him, the situation in the country is very bad. If you go to the towns and villages and see the conditions in which the average people live, it is unbearable. A lot should have been said in that speech which were left unsaid.

 

Do you think the government has learnt any lessons from this protest?

The people reacted to his speech at two levels. Number one is that the speech angered them even more because they were expecting to hear a lot more in terms of ameliorating the situation. At another level, the speech seemed to be something like his achievements in the last one year because he dwelled so much on what has been achieved. But the common man will see that these achievements are on paper and have no relationship with whatsoever the president was saying. He goes to the market the following day and still buys what he bought yesterday at the same price today or even more. The president tended to issue, at some point, threats and orders which in the present circumstances should really have been the opposite. He should have appealed to the people, to their reasoning and offered them something concrete. It’s then that they will sit up and listen. But his speech has angered the citizens more, unfortunately.

The president, in his speech, mentioned palliatives which he claimed have been sent to Nigerians but, unfortunately, they do not get to those who actually need them. The palliatives rather go through political officeholders who will rather share with families and cronies. People are now saying that the president should have talked about how to tackle insecurity which is what has prevented farmers from accessing their farms and has led to food crisis and hunger in the land.

When the president, in his campaign, said that he was going to continue with the good work of Muhammadu Buhari, I didn’t believe him. I thought it was just a campaign stunt. But when he continued with these so-called palliatives which began under Buhari with all its shortcomings, with all the corruption that came with it, then, of course, he continued the failure of Buhari rather than building his own success. Everybody knows that these palliatives are nothing in terms of concrete policy that works; that directly impacts majority of the people.

Those who distribute the palliatives will trickle them down from top to bottom without anything reaching the common man. Since Buhari, I have never seen a single individual who told me that he received palliatives. Palliative is not the way to go at all because it is an absolute and complete failure and waste of resources. It is practically meant to enrich a few individuals and the evidence is all there in the trial or accusations against the former Minister of Humanitarian Affairs who administered the palliatives under the Buhari administration. Therefore, those resources that were devoted to palliatives should have been channeled to more productive ventures. If those palliatives were directed to small-scale farmers, I mean actual farmers and not briefcase farmers who will come and collect money from the Ministry of Agriculture and disappear to go and marry more wives. There is a way to get these resources to people who actually hold the hoes and the sickles and actually go to the farm, but this has never been considered.

The whole situation, as you rightly pointed out, is the issue of insecurity which has continued to affect us in the North East and the North West, especially small-scale farmers who are feeding this country. They have been murdered by insurgents and bandits simply because they go to their farms in order to feed their immediate families. There is a desertion of every place in the most productive areas in our country, particularly in Niger, Katsina, Benue and Zamfara states. If they say Nigeria has food crisis, it is something I saw long time ago and is bound to happen. Since there are no real achievements in terms of tackling insecurity, the two are, therefore, interrelated. Insecurity breeds the lack of production we have seen across the land. There is no way this economy will recover because whether we like it or not, we, the elites, are not the productive sector of this country. The people in the productive sector are in the villages and the rural areas. They are the ones who feed the cities. Whatever must be done to tackle insecurity must be done without wasting any more time.

 

What form of intervention should the National Assembly apply, especially the NNPP caucus, to rekindle the hope of the common man?

Unfortunately, we did not constitute the Federal Government. If we were at the centre, probably this question can be addressed to us and we’ll find the right answers, but it is the APC that is at the centre, and they have proven from inception that they are not a party that is remotely interested in governing this country rightly. They came as a motley of parties without any philosophy or ideology or direction. And they captured the Federal Government and other states and the translation of it is what we see today. And I believe if Nigerians were to give them another chance in 2027, the situation can only worsen. And we believe that the only party that is definitely untested and untried but which holds the largest and biggest promise for the common man through what we have done so far in one state through our agricultural policy, urban renewal, in the promotion of education in particular could have done a lot of good for the country. The NNPP would have transformed this country completely from what we are having now.

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