Source: Tribune
05/05/2013 – A new twist has been introduced into the 2015 presidential race as northern rice farmers have challenged President Goodluck Jonathan to ban importation of rice if he wants to secure the immediate support of the core north for his rumoured re-election bid.
Many rice farmers across the three states of Sokoto,Kebbi and Zamfara threw this challenge during the week while receiving the Minister of Agriculture, Dr Akinwumi Adesina, who inspected about 20 rice farms across the three states.
From one rice field to the other, the farmers lamented that their farm outputs, in terms of raw rice, were not being purchased by rice millers, urging the president to ban rice importation as a way of taking he north out of poverty.
The farmers, who spoke in Hausa, pointed at several kilometres of rice fields engaging several hundreds of youths and adults with many of them asking the reporter to tell Sugaban Jonathan that farmers in the north need him to act fast.
Mallam Rufai who spokeon the rice field of Argungu, the fish festival town, in Kebbi State, told the Sunday Tribune in Hausa that “if he can help us buy our rice, we will support him to any level. We farmers are not fighting him; we are poor people here and we only want to survive.”
Speaking through an interpreter, Rufai said Jonathan should not worry about those big northerners in Abuja and Kaduna, adding, “we farmers are with him if he is ready to be with us.“
As if to drive the message home more clearly, a former member of the House of Representatives, who is now holding key position within the Zamfara State government told the Sunday Tribune that what the farmers were saying was real.
“I cannot be quoted as I belong to the opposition. But let me state this clearly. Jonathan`s only joker to win second term with northern votes is to play rice politics. Yes, he should dump the rice cabal and reach out to northern rice farmers,” he said.
According to the former legislator, “those elite in Abuja and Kaduna are not telling the president the truth. The reality is that grass-roots north needs help. The help they need is to get out of poverty. If he bans rice importation, speed up those hundred rice mills he is facilitating, he should go to sleep“.
Meanwhile, the Nigerian Customs Service has appealed to stakeholders in the rice sector to learn from their colleagues in the tobacco industry by collaborating in information sharing and intelligence gathering instead of trading blames in the difficult task of curbing rice smuggling into the country.
Speaking in Abuja, the Public Relation Officer of the Nigerian Customs Service, Mr Wale Adeniyi, disclosed that in the last two months alone, the customs service recorded seizure of 35,000 bags of rice from various regions of the country, advising that the war against smugglers can only be successful when stakeholders collaborate with enforcement agencies.
Denying reports credited to some stakeholders, Adeniyi said the service was not and could never be overrun by smugglers, assuring that “we are committed to stopping rice smuggling and we are daily refining our strategy through application of information technology in the monitoring of various smuggling routes in the country”.