Nigeria hit by wave of food looting as economic crisis deepens

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Nigeria has been hit by a wave of violent unrest over food as its economic and security crisis deepens, raising fears of widespread hunger and a breakdown in law and order in Africa’s most populous nation.

Assaults on grain warehouses have been reported across the country in recent weeks after the cost of living reached levels not seen since the mid-1990s and the food inflation rate jumped above 35 per cent at the start of the year.

The government has been forced to deploy security forces to warehouses in Abuja after an incident on the outskirts of the capital this month, in which an angry crowd descended on a storage facility in the city and emptied it of grain, badly damaging the building in the process. The looting continued for more than two hours before police restored order.

The assault followed a stampede last month at the Lagos regional headquarters of Nigeria’s customs service as it sold off bags of rice confiscated from smugglers at a quarter of the market price. The chaos left seven people dead, including a member of the ruling All Progressives Congress party.

The IMF estimates that 8 per cent of Nigeria’s nearly 200mn people are food insecure, and this month urged the government to tackle the issue as an “immediate policy priority”.

The African Development Bank warned in last month’s Africa Macroeconomic Performance report that a failure to address rising food costs threatened social unrest.

“People are rebelling against a perceived break in the social contract between the state and society,” said Afolabi Adekaiyaoja, an analyst at the Abuja-based Centre for Democracy and Development think-tank. “This could descend into uncontrolled chaos if not carefully managed.”

The World Bank last month blamed “persistent insecurity and armed conflict” for the situation, which it said would leave seven states in northern Nigeria at “crisis food security levels” this year.

Long-running structural issues in Nigeria have kept food costs high for much of the past decade. Productivity is low, with agriculture dominated by subsistence farmers.

But the insecurity in the country’s north, a region beset by Islamist insurgents and criminal gangs kidnapping for ransom, has had a severe impact on production and prices.

More than 500 people, including almost 300 schoolchildren, have been kidnapped in three different incidents across northern Nigeria in recent weeks. Gangs have driven some farmers off their fields, while others are forced to pay criminals for access to their own land, according to a report by Lagos consultancy SBM Intelligence.

Failure to comply can be deadly. “Those who resist . . . face severe consequences, including abduction, murder or confiscation of their produce,” said the report.

Last year’s decisions by President Bola Tinubu’s government to cut fuel subsidies and abandon a long-standing currency peg to allow the naira to trade freely brought the crisis to a head. The reforms have severely affected prices in a nation that relies heavily on road transport to distribute goods and imports much of what it consumes, making it vulnerable to exchange rate movements.

According to government data, the price of a kilo of rice has doubled in the past year. A western-backed donation of 25,000 tonnes of wheat from Ukraine in February via the World Food Programme sparked a debate over the optics of a war-torn country donating aid to a nation nominally at peace, with opposition politician Peter Obi calling it the result of years of “leadership failure”.

Glory Ehiremen, a senior analyst at SBM, said the Tinubu government needed to boost food production by ensuring the security of farmers, mechanising agriculture and boosting storage capacity to reduce loss and wastage.

“Addressing food insecurity is a national emergency,” said Ehiremen. The ransacking of warehouses was a measure of the difficulties people faced, she said, adding: “There is growing concern within the private sector that the looting could result in the closure of businesses all round the country.”

The government’s response has been muted but last month it released more than 100,000 metric tonnes of grains from its national strategic reserves for distribution by state governments. The customs service said last week that it would auction 400 bags of beans it had seized at a border area.

Nigerian authorities also announced a crackdown last month on alleged hoarding by middlemen in the food industry. Tinubu has ordered security agencies to investigate such accusations, while officials in the northern state of Kano said 10 warehouses have been seized and that their owners faced prosecution over claims of hoarding.

But analysts warned the strategy risked encouraging the public to see warehouses as legitimate targets, when in many cases they were simply storing stock for private businesses that bought in bulk to sell on later.

“If the government doesn’t respect private property, then why should ordinary citizens?” said Joachim MacEbong, a governance analyst at data firm Stears. “Especially if they’re hungrier. People could be taking their cues from the government.”