—Says Reported 17 Million Nigerians Facing Acute Hunger Is a Government-Created Humanitarian Disaster
Emmanuel Abi Couson
The African Democratic Congress (ADC) has described reports that more than 17 million Nigerians, including infants and young children, are facing acute hunger as a growing humanitarian disaster created by the Tinubu administration’s incompetence, misplaced priorities and failed policies.
The party made the statement following a United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) report showing that more than 17 million Nigerians across nine conflict-affected northern states are facing acute hunger.
In a statement signed by its National Publicity Secretary, Mallam Bolaji Abdullahi, the party condemned the Tinubu-led APC Federal Government for what it described as its “cruel indifference” to the growing humanitarian crisis brought about principally by its failure to contain the banditry and terrorism that has displaced farming communities, as well as the harsh economic policies that have pushed food beyond the reach of millions of Nigerians.
The full statement read:
The African Democratic Congress (ADC) has received with profound concern the latest assessment by the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), which confirms that Nigeria is now facing one of its worst food security emergencies in almost a decade.
According to the WFP, more than 17 million Nigerians across nine conflict-affected northern states are now facing Crisis, Emergency or Catastrophic levels of food insecurity. This represents an increase of almost two million people from previous projections. In Borno State alone, more than three million people are acutely food insecure, while the combined figure for Borno, Adamawa and Yobe has risen to 6.2 million people.
These are not opposition figures. They are not campaign slogans. They are the findings of the world’s leading humanitarian agency on hunger.
The WFP also identifies the principal causes of this unfolding tragedy: expanding insecurity, attacks on farming communities, mass displacement, restricted humanitarian access and declining support for vulnerable populations.
In other words, the hunger confronting millions of Nigerians today is not a natural disaster. It is an APC-inspired government-created humanitarian disaster.
This humanitarian crisis is also the predictable outcome of a government that has failed to secure Nigerian lives, failed to protect Nigerian farmers and failed to address the cost-of-living crisis that it has created.
For three years, the Tinubu government has repeatedly told Nigerians that the pain that we experiencing is temporary. The WFP has now confirmed what Nigerians have been saying all along: insecurity is spreading, agricultural production is declining, food inflation is worsening and millions of us, the Nigerian people, are being pushed deeper into hunger.
What makes this tragedy even more painful is that it has unfolded under a government whose priorities have been fundamentally misplaced. While millions of Nigerian families are struggling to eat even one meal a day and parents are forced to decide which child eats first, the Tinubu administration has kept its heads in the clouds. Only recently, a spokesman for the administration made a statement denying the tragic reality of acute hunger in the country while government officials feed fat and live the life of obscene opulence.
The tragedy is that none of this was inevitable.
The ADC has consistently argued that Nigeria’s food crisis cannot be solved by speeches, palliatives or reactive interventions. It requires a coherent national strategy that treats food security as an issue of national survival. That is precisely why the ADC Manifesto places food security and agriculture at the centre of national security and economic policy.
An ADC government will place food security permanently on the agenda of the National Security Council and coordinate a unified national response across the federal, state and local governments.
Our manifesto commits to placing smallholder farmers at the centre of agricultural policy through investments in improved inputs, mechanisation, extension services and market access because Nigeria cannot defeat inflation without dramatically increasing food production.
We will immediately activate the country’s 264 abandoned dams to support year-round irrigation, reduce dependence on seasonal rainfall and expand agricultural productivity. We will also invest in aggregation centres, warehouses, cold-chain infrastructure and strategic grain reserves to reduce post-harvest losses, stabilise food prices and protect Nigerian households during periods of economic distress.
These are not policies invented in response to today’s headlines. They are already contained in the ADC Manifesto because we recognised long ago that insecurity, food inflation and unemployment are not separate crises. They are different consequences of the same failure of governance.
The WFP has now confirmed what millions of Nigerians already know from painful daily experience: hunger is spreading, insecurity is winning and this government has no plan.
