Food, food and food remain the most constant nutritional and vitamin value humans cannot do without. Our existence depends on it or else humanity will go into extinction. We cannot dare joke about the lack of food. Nobody has made food its enemy.

These are the reasons why serious nations make deliberate efforts toward not just having food security, but making it strategically abundant, available, and affordable for the people. In other words, there is greater attention to government policy direction that defines food, essentially, as the number one priority on the scale of preference. In this regard, the policy to make food available all year round and affordable is not toiled with no matter how the economic technical conundrum calls it inflation or food inflation.

Food must be on the table for every household
Recently, there were soaring energy and food prices, with inflation of over 7.5 per cent in the USA and above five per cent in Europe and the UK. Their governments are not sleeping over the situation. Taming food inflation headlong through pragmatic efforts has been deployed, because they grasp deeply the social cost of food inflation beyond just the economic technicality of it.

What then is Inflation? 
With hindsight, a simplistic definition of inflation is the general rise in the prices of goods and services in a particular country, at a particular period, which results in a fall in the value of money. In this way, inflation simply devalues and weakens a country’s currency, as well as erodes the purchasing power of income and wages available for workers to spend on food and other desired needs.

Significantly, food inflation if let loose, would affect mostly the poor who are greatly vulnerable. Nigerians are asking what is fuelling food inflation in the country? Specifically, they want to know how the government policies failed to tame food inflation. Yet Governments present or past have one or more projects in this direction.

Nigerians will never forget how the military government truncated the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th and Rolling Development Plans. A sizeable segment of these development plans focuses on food self-sufficiency and economic self-reliance through local resource development. Moreso, that they are laudable economic frameworks with multi-sectoral approaches, they were jettisoned due to a lack of government policy continuity.

Meanwhile, a modest history of how our nation’s policy economics has been formulated and implemented since 1999 when civil democratic government returned, showed nothing significant has been achieved to address the economic challenges. And, for us, one of such troubling issues is the rising food inflation.

Noticeably, the aftermath of successive Governments in Nigeria’s failure on policy economics always gets every concerned citizen thinking and one would wonder how we got so deep in the mess we found ourselves in, even though we are a resources-blessed nation.

Surprisingly we are not lacking in policies or policy formulation and development ideas as a point of departure in our clime. This, in fact, demonstrates why a lot is expected from us as African most populous people with brilliant minds and skills.

Sadly, Nigerians are looked down upon as our green passport on any immigration desk outside our shore is scrutinised and interrogated under heavy suspicion. Why? Because we by ourselves are careless about dignity. What the outside has come to know about us is the ‘corruption’ and ‘looting’ of public funds that permeated our government structures as exhibited by people who are lucky to have been elected or appointed.

Some of us as political economists or economists are ashamed and disappointed because the government over time would always create the impression of walking the talk of many of its policy economics. Alas! To the greatest surprise of Nigerians, it is always media hype and shows that have never translated the economy better to lift citizens out of poverty.

Nevertheless, for the period under review, many Nigerians can never forget in a hurry the following policies; National Economic Empowerment Development Strategy (NEEDs), State Economic Empowerment Development Strategy (SEEDs), Local Government Economic Empowerment Development Strategy (LEEDs), were jealously guarded policies of the Olusegun Obasanjo administration (1999-2007).

However, the Obasanjo dead-on-arrival third-term agenda made a mess of those brilliantly coined policies with massive input from the World Bank experts and others. We would not also fail to mention how this same policy was linked to the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD).

Another is the 7-Points Agenda of Umaru Musa Yar’Adua (2007- 2010), with a deliberate focus on Electricity, the Rule of Law, Health, and Transportation while Agriculture was tailored to reduce food importation.

Similarly, to the above, was the Transformation Agenda of Goodluck Jonathan (2010 -2015), which even produced Transformation Ambassadors across the country and outside the nation. Ushering in a new lexicon called economic diversification and a clear approach toward agro-produce export orientation and cassava bread made famous by the then Dr. Akinwumi Adesina minister of agriculture.
To be continued tomorrow