FOOD CRISIS: CHECK THE WAREHOUSE PILLAGING NOW!

The  pillaging of warehouses and trucks that is now  becoming a trend in some parts of the country is a poignant anticlimax of the current food crisis. It started earlier this year as spasmodic attacks by indignant youths presumably protesting the spiraling costs of living, especially the astronomically steep rise in the prices of food items.

That the hitherto isolated pernicious act is fast developing into a norm is infernal. It defies logic. True, the times are hard. Food inflation continues to surge. The prices of staple items are shooting almost beyond the rooftops. Economic hardship has heightened since the sudden removal of fuel subsidy.

True, it is inexorable that an average individual walloped by the pangs of hunger, to a certain level, could be impelled to act in some ignoble way. But there are dividing lines. It is axiomatic that what an average person does under influence, whether of alcohol or hunger, is intrinsic to his or her character.

Hence, a naturally perky person tends to remain genial or cheerful under influence, even though he could intersperse his actions with a little dose of drama or exaggeration. Conversely, an intrinsically unruly fellow goes uproarious under the same influence.

How does one situate the invasion of a government warehouse in Abuja penultimate Sunday morning by some vile characters? The hoodlums were said to have descended on the facility belonging to the Agricultural and Rural Development Secretariat of the Federal Capital Territory Administration(FCTA) in Gwagwa area of Abuja and for two hours mercilessly plundered it.

The malicious invaders, suspected to have been instigated by some youths in the environment, did not only steal all the grains and other food items in the store, they also vandalized the facility inside out and carted away all the roofing sheets, doors, windows and gates available.

They were said to have swarmed around the warehouse when the food items were being offloaded before they descended on the facility and looted everything, running into millions.

After pillaging the government warehouse, the rampaging vandals proceeded to the neighbouring Karmo town and also plundered a private warehouse located at Sabuwar-Unguwa and stocked by a trader. The owner of the looted warehouse, Murtala Ibrahim Gusau, said the malefactors stole 711 bags of rice, 652 bags of beans and 1,602 bags of sugar.

The police, according to him, were eventually able to recover about 363 bags of rice, 475 bags of beans and 1,255 bags of sugar from the vandals’ hideout and some households. Two of the 15 suspects arrested in connection with the looting of FCTA’s warehouse turned out be guards attached to the facility!

Barely 24 hours later, some residents of Dei-Dei town in the Bwari Local Area of FCT also attacked and looted a truck carrying food items. The truck coming from Zuba area via Mandalla Road was attacked in front of the NNPC filling station in Dei-Dei.

The food items in the truck were being conveyed to the government warehouse attacked on Sunday. “But because of the attack on the warehouse,” an eyewitness volunteered, “the truck was parked along Mandalla Road until Monday morning when the driver received a signal that everything was under control. He then proceeded to the warehouse  but he was attacked before he got there.”

Miscreants in their numbers about the same time invaded another warehouse in the Idu Industrial Estate, Jabi, Abuja, but they were repelled by soldiers guarding the facility.

In another despicable development, some residents of Dogarawa area of Zaria in Kaduna State also penultimate Friday despoiled a truck belonging to BUA company conveying cartons of noodles. The manner the looting was done was particularly ignominious and befuddling.
The driver had parked the truck beside a mosque and joined others to observe the Jumat prayers only for some of his co- congregants to descend on his truck and looted it. A week before this, some youths went berserk, attacked and plundered some trucks carrying  food items and stuck in traffic along  Kaduna Road in Suleja, Niger State.

These grotesque acts certainly cannot be normal expressions motivated by hunger. They are nothing short of criminality being perpetrated by irascible elements hiding under the cloak of the public hoopla about food crisis. After all, there had been protests in many states over the astronomical rise in the prices of food items but they were largely peaceful and devoid of heist.

The Minister of State for FCT, Dr Mariya Mahmoud, was on point when she paid an assessment visit to the vandalized FCTA’s warehouse in Abuja. “The way this(looting) happened is beyond hunger,” she rightly surmised. “This is a criminal act. Somebody who is hungry cannot remove all the roofings that are here, all the doors, all the windows and also the gates.”

We cannot agree more with the minister. Earlier, she had described the looting of the warehouse as “a bad situation” that the FCT administration would not take lightly. “All those that are involved must be brought to book. We have to do something,” she said, adding: “And also, this is a sign that we have to reinforce the security around our warehouses.”

Good talk. But let the administration walk the talk and secure all the warehouses within the FCT. Then, the law must be made to bear its fang and  its big hammer must fall upon the culprits who had been arrested to deter others.

This is also a wake up call on the  federal and state governments to address this challenge squarely. Virtually all the cases of looting cited had all the appurtenances of criminality and heist. They were hardly hunger-induced. So, the egregious trend must be firmly nibbled in the bud before it spreads further and become anarchical.

It is particularly precarious and  irksome that the heinous vandals no longer differentiate between private warehouses and trucks from those of government. They have tended to develop a predilection for attacking just any warehouse and truck in view where they can get food items.

To this end, all the major warehouses where food items and other palliatives are kept must be effectively policed against the rampaging marauders. Some busy and strategic gateways between the North and South must also be policed to shield trucks ferrying food items across the country from further attacks that could aggravate the food crisis.

Already, the Organised Private Sector(OPS) operators have raised an alarm that the incessant attacks could lead to the shutdown of industries across the country because many of their members have incurred outrageous losses to the consistent plunder of their warehouses and trucks. Similarly, truck drivers are broaching a possible strike action should the attacks against them continue.

It is important that the attacks are checked without further delay before they become a street mess where just any store selling foodstuffs in town or just any vehicle ferrying food items are broken into or waylaid respectively.

Some scums of society who have the proclivity for bestiality should not be allowed to compound the present challenge by turning it into the Thomas Hobbesian state where life without a government is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

However, the government should intensify current efforts at ameliorating the food crisis. The continued patience of the majority of law-abiding Nigerians should not be taken for granted. There is a limit to endurance. Reprieve should come soon.

We acknowledge the government’s concerted efforts to, among others, contain unscrupulous Nigerians who are still smuggling food items across the borders in spite of the hues and cries of hunger in the land. The distribution of the grains released from the nation’s strategic reserves were to have started last week, beginning with Niger State.

As we had contended in an earlier editorial, however, government should go beyond tokenism. They should frontally tackle the food crisis by working at drastically crashing the prices of food items. This is the only thing that will make food conveniently affordable.

The truth of the matter is that food items are available. The problem is affordability. The prices have almost shot them beyond the reach of average Nigerians, the middle class inclusive. Unless the prices are deliberately crashed, the ghost of hunger will continue to prowl and haunt, even with the availability of food items.