Food is Now Gold on a Plate: Nigeria’s Hunger Crisis and the Government That Is Still Talking

My Thoughts Have No Filter By Abdul’Azeez Bello

WhatsApp: 0805 113 0075 | omobolajibello@gmail.com

An Hungry Man Is an Angry Man. And Nigeria Is Very, Very Hungry.

Let me start with something simple. Something so basic that it should not even need to be said in 2026.

Food is not a luxury. Food is not a reward for the privileged. Food is not something you earn by being important enough. Food is what human beings need to stay alive. Every single one of them. Every single day.

Nigeria knows this. Every Nigerian knows this. The problem is that the people making decisions about Nigeria’s economy appear to have forgotten it. Or perhaps they never needed to remember it because their own plates have never been empty long enough to understand what empty actually feels like.

Nigeria’s food inflation rose to 20.31 percent in July 2026, its highest level since September 2025, even as headline inflation eased to 15.43 percent.

Let that sentence land where it needs to land. Overall inflation is coming down. But food inflation is going up. The one category of spending that the poorest Nigerian cannot cut, cannot substitute, cannot delay, cannot negotiate away, that is the one that keeps climbing.

The government is celebrating falling headline inflation. The market woman is calculating whether she can afford tomatoes this week. These two people are living in different Nigerias.

The Jollof Rice That Broke the Nation’s Heart

Every Nigerian has a food they grew up eating that felt normal. Affordable. Just there. Part of life.

By June 2025, the average cost of preparing a single pot of Jollof rice had reached N27,528, a 153 percent increase compared to March 2023.

One pot of Jollof rice. The dish that defines us at parties, at funerals, at Sunday afternoons, at celebrations, at ordinary Tuesdays. That pot now costs twenty seven thousand naira to prepare.

Two years ago it cost roughly half that. Two years before that, half of that again. The Jollof rice that once brought Nigerians together at every occasion is quietly becoming an occasion in itself. You do not just cook it anymore. You plan for it. You save for it. You negotiate with the ingredients as if you are settling a land dispute.

In 2026, the same basket of food that cost a Nigerian household a certain amount in 2020 now costs 582 percent more.

Five hundred and eighty two percent more. Not 58 percent. Not 158 percent. Five hundred and eighty two percent. If your salary in 2026 is not more than five times what it was in 2020, which for most Nigerians it very much is not, then you are poorer than you were six years ago even if the number on your payslip looks bigger.

What Is Happening at the Market Right Now

Let us leave the percentage figures and go to the market. Because that is where the truth lives.

A 50kg bag of rice now costs between N80,000 and N89,000. A painter of local rice costs N8,160 in Lagos. Beans sit at N5,550 per painter. Palm oil is N2,400 per litre. A single yam in Abuja costs N8,400.

A single yam. Eight thousand four hundred naira. For one yam. That this number can exist in the same country where the minimum wage conversation is still happening at levels that cannot buy two bags of rice a month should make every government official reading this genuinely ashamed.

Sweet potatoes recorded the highest price increase in recent months, rising over 10 percent in just three months. Irish potatoes jumped 7.45 percent. It is not just the big staples. It is everything. Every item on the list. Every shelf in the market. Everything is going up simultaneously. There is nowhere to turn for a cheaper option because the cheaper option has also become expensive.

In one northern state, food inflation hit a staggering 51.36 percent year-on-year in July 2026. Fifty one percent. In one year. People in that state are paying more than one and a half times what they paid for food just twelve months ago. Their incomes did not grow by fifty one percent. Nothing grew by fifty one percent except their suffering.

Two Out of Three Nigerian Households Are Struggling to Eat

I am going to say something that should be on the front page of every newspaper in Nigeria every single day until something changes.

By mid-2025, it was estimated that two out of three Nigerian households struggled to afford sufficient food, and up to 13 million Nigerians could be pushed into poverty by rising food prices alone.

Two out of three. Take the street you live on right now. Look at the houses. Two out of every three of those families are struggling to put enough food on the table. Not struggling to afford luxury food. Not struggling to buy imported goods. Struggling to afford sufficient food. The basic human requirement for staying alive and functioning.

This is not a developing country statistic from fifty years ago. This is Nigeria. In 2026. With oil. With gas. With solid minerals. With some of the most fertile agricultural land in Africa. With a government that has been announcing food security initiatives since before some of these hungry people were born.

Two out of three Nigerian households struggling to eat is not a policy failure. It is a national emergency. And it should be treated with the urgency that a national emergency deserves.

The Government Spent N7.65 Trillion Importing Food. Prices Still Went Up.

Now here is where the story becomes something between a tragedy and a dark comedy.

The government removed import duties on some food items in 2024. This helped reduce food inflation from 40.8 percent in mid-2024 to 8.89 percent in early 2025. However, food inflation rose again to 14.31 percent in March 2026, showing that prices are still under pressure. Nigeria imported food worth N7.65 trillion in 2025.

Seven trillion, six hundred and fifty billion naira in food imports in one year. And food prices went up anyway. Because importing food does not fix the roads that food travels on after it arrives. It does not fix the storage facilities so inadequate that a significant portion of Nigeria’s agricultural produce rots before it reaches the consumer.

Experts say the problem is not just about spending money. It is about deeper issues in the system. Poor supply chain and storage. High transportation costs. A lot of food is wasted because of bad storage and weak distribution systems.

So Nigeria is spending trillions importing food while locally produced food rots in farms and markets because the infrastructure to move it, store it and distribute it does not work. We are paying for food twice. Once to import it. And once in the waste and inefficiency that makes local production unviable. The government is pouring water into a bucket with holes in it and then announcing that it has been pouring water.

The Street Food Seller Is the Last Line of Defence. And She Is Running Out of Options.

Here is the person that nobody in power ever thinks about when they are designing food policy.

She wakes up at four in the morning. She buys her ingredients at prices that went up again since last week. She sets up her spot. She adjusts her portions because she cannot raise her prices too high or her customers will disappear. She extends credit to the regular who has not been paid this month. She absorbs the difference herself. She goes home at night having fed dozens of people and made just enough to do it again tomorrow.

Street food sellers are the real MVPs of this season. These are the women and men who stretch ingredients, keep prices affordable, and extend credit quietly when the bank alert refuses to come. Across Nigeria, street food sellers absorb delayed payments, adjust portions, and keep feeding.

She is not a policy. She is not a programme. She is a human being who decided that feeding her community matters and who is doing it every day at personal financial cost. But even she has limits. When the street food seller can no longer absorb the increases, which is getting closer every single day, the last affordable food option for millions of low-income Nigerians disappears. And what replaces it is hunger.

To the Government: We Are Not Finding It Funny

Let me drop the sarcasm for one paragraph and speak plainly.

An hungry man is an angry man. This is not a proverb. This is a warning.

Nigeria is a country of over 220 million people. Two out of every three of those people are struggling to eat. Food inflation is at 20.31 percent and rising. Thirteen million more people are at risk of being pushed into poverty by food prices alone. The staples that define Nigerian daily life, rice, beans, garri, yam, tomatoes, onions, pepper, have all become expensive enough to require planning and sacrifice for the average household.

This is not a situation that can be managed with press releases. This is not a problem that improves just because the headline inflation number looks better. People are hungry. Right now. Today. This is urgent.

The Way Forward

The solutions to Nigeria’s food crisis are known. They have been written in reports and presented at conferences for years. The problem is not knowledge. The problem is execution.

Fix the roads that food travels on.

High transportation costs are one of the biggest contributors to food price increases. A farmer who produces tomatoes cheaply cannot sell them cheaply if the truck journey from farm to market costs more than the tomatoes are worth. Every kilometer of bad road between a farm and a market is a tax on food. Fix the roads and food prices fall.

Build and maintain proper storage infrastructure.

Nigeria loses an enormous portion of its agricultural output to post-harvest losses every year. Grain that could feed millions rots in inadequate storage. Investing in storage is not optional. It is the difference between abundance and artificial scarcity.

Protect farmers and bring them back to their land.

Insecurity has driven farmers off agricultural land across multiple regions. Every farm that is abandoned because a farmer fears for their life is food that Nigeria does not produce. Security in farming communities is food security. It must be treated as such with urgency.

Make inputs affordable for small-scale farmers.

Seeds, fertiliser, pesticides and farming equipment have all become significantly more expensive. A small-scale farmer who cannot afford inputs cannot produce food. Targeted subsidies for genuine smallholder farmers, delivered directly and transparently, would immediately increase domestic food production.

Stabilise the naira and reduce import dependency.

Every food item that Nigeria imports is priced in foreign currency. Every time the naira weakens, imported food becomes more expensive regardless of what is happening to global food prices. A stable naira is a food security policy. Treat it as one.

The Verdict

Even if food inflation returns to single digits on a year-on-year basis, the price level itself, what Nigerians actually pay at the market, remains dramatically higher than it was before the compound shocks of 2023, 2024, and 2025 hit sequentially.

The Nigerian household that spent dramatically more on food this year than six years ago is not going back. The prices that went up do not come back down just because the rate of increase slows. That standard of living has been reset permanently downward.

Food has become gold on a plate in Nigeria. Desired. Beautiful in concept. And completely out of reach for the majority of the people who need it most.

This is not acceptable. This is not something Nigerians should be asked to endure. This is not a sacrifice worth making for an economic transformation that keeps being announced and keeps failing to arrive in the kitchens and the market baskets of ordinary people.

Our lips will not stop saying this.

Our faces will not soften on this.

An hungry man is an angry man. And Nigeria is very, very hungry.

Abdul’Azeez Bello writes from the streets of Nigeria, where the truth is always louder than the headlines.

My Thoughts Have No Filter.