Nigeria’s quest for self-sufficiency in rice production has, without doubt, got off to an enthusiastic start, with some states already earning for themselves the epithet of “rice-producing.” States like Kebbi, Kaduna, Kano, Jigawa and Ebonyi have taken frontline roles in the battle to wean the country off foreign rice consumption by providing much of the local alternative.
Yet, it is also becoming increasingly clear that realising this dream will not only be dependent on a massive cultivation of the staple but, even more significantly, on how Nigeria is able to efficiently police her porous borders to shut out smuggled rice from neighbouring countries.
Smuggling has over the years been the bane of the Nigerian economy, rendering ineffectual whatever policies the government introduces to firm up the economy or address identifiable areas of vulnerability. A good example of a thriving sector of the economy that crumbled under the asphyxiating impact of smuggling is the textile industry. At the peak of its glory, the Nigerian textile industry was the highest employer of labour in the country, accounting for more than three million direct and indirect jobs.
According to a former Minister of State for Industry, Trade and Investment, Aisha Abubakar, who is now in charge of Women Affairs and Social Development, the country boasted over 175 textile mills between the 1980s and 1990s. With Lagos, Kano, Kaduna, Aba, Asaba, Funtua, Port Harcourt and Gusau playing host to some of the mills, the textile industry reportedly contributed 25 per cent to the Gross Domestic Product of the country. But, in one fell swoop, cheap textile materials from China and India, two of the world’s largest producers, flooded the Nigerian market and practically wiped out all the gains of the textile revolution.
Nigeria faces the prospect of a similar occurrence in her current drive for self-sufficiency in rice production. Despite investing billions of naira in rice cultivation and processing through the Anchor Borrowers Programme of the Federal Government and the Central Bank of Nigeria, smuggling remains a major threat that could roll back the tremendous progress already made in rice cultivation. Aside from increasing the cultivation of rice in the country, the government has to take an interest in what obtains in the neighbouring countries of Benin, Cameroon and Niger.
Recently, the Nigeria Customs Service announced the seizure of 238,094 bags of rice between January and November this year. This is a staggering figure that could set the country back in her rice self-sufficiency bid. Considering the fact that the Customs, for reasons including the lack of capacity and compromise by some of its unscrupulous officials, might not be able to stop every bag of smuggled rice from making it past the border, it could be taken that the seizure is just a fraction of what must have entered the country. This is why Customs officials sometimes take their battle from the borders to within the country, raiding shops and warehouses which they claim are harbouring smuggled rice.
To appreciate the progress Nigeria has made so far, it is important to reflect on the situation of things in the recent past. Before the government decided to take the bull by the horns and curtail unbridled rice imports, official figures showed that Nigerians were consuming between 5.5 million and six million metric tonnes of rice annually. The Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investment under Segun Aganga said Nigeria was spending N360 billion annually on rice imports, almost a billion naira per day.
At a naira exchange rate for the United States dollar that was half the prevailing rate, it was a burden the tottering oil-dependent economy could not realistically bear for too long. Of course, this situation earned the country the dubious distinction of becoming the second largest importer of rice, next only to China, the most populous country in the world. This also sent the overall food import bill through the roof, quite unacceptable for a country with boundless potential for self-sufficiency in food production.
It was indeed very disheartening to hear the Minister of State for Agriculture, Heineken Lokpobiiri, say recently that neighbouring states were taking advantage of the ECOWAS protocol to flood Nigeria with re-bagged imported rice. Once again, as in many areas of life, the Nigerian government is showing despicable weakness and helplessness when it should act decisively to prevent the country from becoming a dumping ground for foreign goods.
Without mincing words, it should be stated that there is no serious country that takes the security of its borders for granted. It should be noted that the current government shut-down in the United States, whatever the political dimension to it, has to do with border policing. In North Korea, for example, anybody that so much as strays across its border illegally is in for a long term imprisonment. As has been seen in cases involving Americans, only very high levels of diplomatic negotiations have been able to free any border violator from the repressive claws of the reclusive government. As long as Nigeria’s borders remain largely porous, the economy will never get out of the woods.
Nigeria should learn to take the policing of her borders seriously. Failure to do so has been at the root of the country’s current security crisis, spawning the influx of arms and the free movement in and out of terrorists and killer Fulani militia. It has been extended to the area of food security, which is a very delicate and dangerous national issue.
Immediately it became obvious that the shipment of rice into Benin Republic and Cameroon had spiked, a responsive and responsible government should have taken the initiative of forestalling the likely diversion of the commodity to Nigeria through the borders. No action should be too severe to take when it comes to policing the country’s borders, even if it means a complete closure of borders as was done during the Olusegun Obasanjo administration. That singular action curbed the free movement of bandits from Benin that specialised in stealing vehicles in Nigeria. President Muhammadu Buhari has to act now to save the rice revolution.
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