Sad, Ogbeh can’t guess answers to food woes

WHEN President Muhammadu Buhari appointed the former National Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), now a chieftain of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Chief Audu Ogbeh as Minister of Agriculture in November 2015, many saw his appointment as a round peg in a round hole. Ogbeh is not trained in agriculture but he is a practicing farmer and with that, many thought he would understand the language of the sector.

Today, it can be said that those who were enthusiastic about Ogbeh’s appointment are completely at a loss as to what has become of the Benue-born politician and farmer. Those of them who had a faint hope that Ogbeh would at least fit the huge shoes left behind by Dr. Akinwumi Adesina are today as bewildered as the rest of the population.

The minister first shocked many with his controversial suggestion that Nigerian can import grass from Brazil for use of herdsmen. That was in his attempt to rid the nation of the incessant farmers/herdsmen clashes. On Thursday, Ogbeh hit another low when he appeared before the Joint Committee on Agriculture of the Senate and the House of Representatives by telling the nation that food prices had gone up because of the extortion of truck drivers by policemen, Customs and soldiers at checkpoints across the country. He is right that the price of diesel, which has gone to N300 per litre is a contributing factor, though.

He said that reports reaching his table even after an official complaint to the different agencies still indicated that security operatives have continued the spate of extortions. According to him, one of the causes of high cost of food prices “is the daily unbearable extortions, men of the Nigeria Police, their counterparts in the Army and Customs Service visit on truck drivers conveying farm produce from the hinterland to urban centres under the guise of carrying out security checks.

He added: “These truck drivers, based on open lamentations made to the ministry in recent time, alleged that at every check points, they are always forced to part with reasonable amount of money by any group of the security agencies, which they said, made farmers to have no option than to factor cost of the extortion into prices of the food items.”

I fervently disagree with our Honourable Minister, the farmer. Granted that the menace of security operatives at the checkpoints deserves appropriate condemnation and action by the authorities, that the misdemenour is responsible for rising food prices of foodstuffs is anything by the truth.

We have to ask Chief Ogbeh if those checkpoints only sprang up when President Buhari came into office and why the said extortions failed to have any impact on the prices of food items in the five years of the Goodluck Jonathan Presidency.

This question of skyrocketing prices of food items was a major push for the anti-government protests witnessed across the country last week. Before the protests, social media activists had bombarded the networks with posts highlighting the differences in the prices of food items since President Buhari took over Nigerian affairs. The tables of different items being circulated clearly showed that things are not the same again and that Nigerians have been groaning under the massive effects of a debilitating inflation. Perhaps Ogbeh was trying his hands on some alibi for the government by placing the blame on the doorsteps of security agencies.

Nothing binds the various strata of the society together more than the market. The rich and the poor have to find their ways into the different sections of the markets. Even if they buy different volumes of items, the prices per unit are levelers. But the answer from Ogbeh is disappointing and demoralising and it should not be a surprise to say that many of those in government at this point have no clue about the solutions to the worsening economic situation Nigerians are faced with.

The checkpoint malaise has been an undying phenomenon which we have lived with since early 70s. That act is disgraceful, no doubt, but you wonder how our Minister is struggling to tie the misbehavior at the checkpoints to the price hike in food items in the last 20 months.

The Ministry of Agriculture, which executes the government’s food security programmes, should remain the authority on the how and why food prices have continued to head skywards. If all we have thus remains the Ogbeh submission and some governors who have declared work free days to enable civil servants head to the farms, then the situation is dire.

I just can’t understand why the government of President Buhari and the Ministry of Agriculture headed by Ogbeh will choose to throw away the policies of Dr. Adeshina, which were already rekindling the trust of many Nigerians in agriculture. The fertiliser policy, which helped to eliminate corruption in the sector, has been thrown into the dustbin, and only recently, fertiliser manufacturers cried to the National

Assembly about the monumental fraud already pervading that sector in just two years. The same fate has befallen the various agriculture initiatives of the Jonathan administration.  This only amounts to disservice to the common man and one can say boldly that it is the aggregate of that, rather than the egunje that exchanges hands at the checkpoints, is responsible for the sky high prices of foodstuffs.