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Civil Society Organisations under the Joint Action Civil Society Coalition,said Nigeria lost over 2,000 citizens to worsening insecurity in the first quarter of 2021,
They punctured President Muhammadu Buhari administration for its failure to resolve the nation’s security challenges .
In a joint statement,the group implored Nigerians to register their displeasure with the state of affairs across the country by participating in a series of mass actions from Monday, May 26, 2021.
They also emphasized the need for Nigerians to participate in solemn assemblies across the country to commemorate the 4th National Day of mourning and remembrance of victims of mass atrocities on May 28, 2021.
They advised all the citizens to boycott all Democracy Day activities on May 29, 2021 in protest against the deplorable state of the nation’s democracy.
“Following its sharp increase of 43 per cent in mass atrocities in 2020, Nigeria has continued to experience a decline in security across the nation.In the first quarter of 2021(January to March), we recorded an all-time quarterly high of almost 2000 fatalities from mass atrocities incidents across the country.This week, across the six geopolitical zones, there were escalated combustions of violence resulting in even more deaths.”
They noted that they highlighted the various forms of insecurities which were leading to loss of lives across the country, in their last joint statement issued in February 2021.
Some of them include, the unending war in the North-East and attacks on peaceful protesters by security agents while terrorists carry out mass murder, rape, maiming and kidnapping of Nigerians including women and children.
They expressed disgust over the way government grants amnesty to terrorists, saying: “This is tantamount to funding and supporting terrorists, encouraging murder and the decimation of the Nigeria’s gallant troops and amounts to treason against the Nigerian state and people,” they added.
The statement also cited cases of terrorist herder attacks on unarmed farming communities and reprisal attacks in the face of government inaction and failure to bring the terrorist herdsmen and their funders to justice, as causes of loss of innocent lives.
Other instances they cited were, “Large scale terrorist attacks in the North West irresponsibly tagged by the government as ‘banditry’ in a bid to downplay their criminality.”
Meanwhile,All Farmers Association of Nigeria(AFAN) has said that the prevailing level of insecurity plaguing the country will lead to food shortage this year and beyond
Arc.Kabir Ibrahim,the National President of the association,who disclosed this in Abuja at weekend,expressed worry over the rapid rate insecurity is enveloping every parts of the country
He said the most vulnerable segment of the society bearing the brunt of the insecurity is the small holder farmers(SHFs), who are the engine room of food production in Nigeria.
He added:”The aggregate food production by the SHFs is the bedrock on which the food system rests in Nigeria, therefore extreme care should be taken to offer them the necessary protection to continue the assiduous work to feed the nearly 200 million mouths in Nigeria today.The farmers cannot readily access their farms in the North East, North West and a good part of the North Central which constitute the food basket of the country, so it is absolutely necessary to secure the farmlands and the farmers who work on the land.
“The incidents of burning of police stations in the South East, the farmer/herder conflicts in the South West and the kidnappings and general insecurity in the South South portend food shortage in the whole nation in 2021 and this therefore calls for concerted effort from all and sundry, government most of all.For Nigeria to avoid the impending fragility and national catastrophe’, the insecurity situation occasioned by Boko Haram, banditry, kidnapping and the IPOB menace has to be tackled decisively.
“The Armed forces are clearly overstretched in this fight going by the spread of the insecurity all over the country. It is now everybody’s responsibility to make the country livable by securing the nooks and crannies of the nation through improvisations and even disruptive innovation where needed!”
He advocated the need to educate farmers on the best methods to adopt to mitigate the effect of flooding in the food system.
The effect of flooding during the 2020 farming season going by the experience of Kebbi, Jigawa and Anambra States,he said, could be very threatening to the food system,adding that a deliberate effort should be put in place to mitigate a reoccurrence as predicted by NIMET and the Directorate of hydrological Services of the Federal Ministry of Water Resources.
According to him, farmers should be incentivised to do three cropping seasons in most of the flood prone areas to make up for the shortfall sprouting from the perennial flooding.
He expressed optimism that the resettlement of farmers and providing them with good inputs and finance will improve food production in order to be able to mitigate food insecurity,” he explained.
He spoke on the Central Bank of Nigeria(CBN) initiative in the implementation of Anchors Borrowers Programme (ABP), and advised that “ABP should be properly and carefully managed by making sure that the real farmers are supported instead of the rumors making the rounds that some fraudulent people are round tripping the so-called surplus produce to make it look like the APB is succeeding.
“Given the level of the CBN investment in agriculture and the availability of food in Nigeria is clearly far less than the investment so far, especially,judging from the skyrocketing food prices across the whole nation,” he counseled that the national food system should be coordinated as an emergency to avert imminent collapse and crushing fragility.It is necessary to take due cognisance of the COVID-19 pandemic on food security but we must note that food insecurity is a more devastating factor to our survival”.
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