OUR BLOG

In 2008, I was engaged by a large multinational that wanted to enter Nigeria, they wanted to introduce nutritious products to the country, however, as a consultant, I traveled the length and breadth of Nigeria, and I was shocked at what I learned. It is shocking that we have failed to realize the depth of the hunger-challenge we face as a nation, about thirty percent of our children are stunted and with stunted growth, it affects their educational pursuits, gives inability to keen to employment and endurance to live a full and meaningful life. Thus, about forty to fifty percent of our fruits and vegetables in Nigeria goes to the waste even though sixty percent of our population works in Agriculture but we still export ninety percent of the processed foods we eat. As a nation, we are facing the crisis of hunger and poverty which is affecting our labor force; about seventeen percent wage loss which is equivalent to the loss of about fifteen billion dollars annually all because of our failure to provide micro-nutrients foods for our children. We also recognize that with the crisis in northern Nigeria, about 4.7 million people are food insecure. Hunger in Nigeria is draining our workforce and killing our future, most of the causes are clearly man-made because we have created them through corruption, inability to invest in local processing, and inability to invest in modern fighting of malnutrition because of the neglect of our agricultural sector which is resulting to low yields and waste. The sad reality is that even though our government stipulated that all manufacturers of oil, flour, sugar, and salt should fortify their products with vitamin A and iodine, it is only two percent of the companies we have in Nigeria who practice this. We have neglected the issue of hunger and poverty in our country, and the question is, why should our children suffer because of the changes we have refused to make? I love this quote by the late Koffi Annan which essentially says that “a man is not free if he’s hungry because on a daily basis he focuses on his next meal”. We see these children every day; in the traffic, in our villages, communities, they are the nieces and nephews, the Aishas in Gombe, Segun in urban Lagos, Uche in Onitsha. They are definitely not different from our children only that, opportunities and circumstances made the difference; however, each of these individuals deserves to have a full and meaningful life.