Bola Adeshiyan last ate 16 hours ago and she is hungry. To take her mind off the ache in her stomach, she leaves her tiny one-bedroom apartment and walks around the bustling streets of her neighborhood in Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital.
On her return, the 55-year-old drinks a little water and settles down to wait to collect leftover beans and unsold bread on credit from a food vendor later in the day.
She will share the meal with her three grandchildren — Dara, Ayinke, and Oba — who have also not eaten since they shared five biscuits in the morning. They and their mother, Esther, also live in the one-bedroom apartment.
Photo: Reuters
Adeshiyan earns 10,000 naira (US$6.49) a week as a cook, but it is enough to cover the weekly groceries for her family.
“I can’t remember the last time we had dinner in this house this year. If they can get a cassava meal daily, that is a good day,” Adeshiyan told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
The Adeshiyans are among millions of families going to bed hungry in Nigeria, as the nation grapples with its worst inflation on record, the result of sweeping economic reforms that have sent prices soaring in Africa’s most populous nation.
After he took office in May last year, Nigerian President Bola Tinubu canceled fuel and electricity subsidies, and devalued the naira against the US dollar to attract investment and save money for infrastructure projects.
Gasoline prices tripled, the naira collapsed against the greenback and food prices soared, forcing Tinubu to open national grain reserves in a bid to control the situation by offering free foodstuffs to hungry families.
Today, basic staples like rice, beans, and bread have become luxury items. The economic hardship triggered nationwide protests this month, and at least 22 people were killed in clashes with the police, Amnesty International said.
Esther said that she spends half of the 60,000 naira she earns every month cleaning bathrooms at a school in the wealthy suburb of Lekki on transport costs that have tripled since gasoline prices rose from 165 naira per liter to 600 naira after the subsidy cuts.
The rest goes on food for her children. But it is not enough.
Adeshiyan has also been unable to pay electricity bills as tariffs have tripled.
“After buying a tin of rice, a tin of beans and some tomatoes, what is left is to buy gas to cook it. We need to eat first before I can recharge [the] electricity,” she said in her darkened apartment.
The crisis triggered by the economic reforms has been exacerbated by ongoing attacks by armed gangs on farms in food-producing northern states, while climate change-related floods and droughts have decimated harvests in other regions, pushing prices higher and millions into hunger.
“The economic reforms had a huge effect on the ability of low-income people to give themselves adequate nutrition. People have been priced out of the market like I’ve never seen before,” said David Stevenson, the head of the UN’s World Food Programme in Nigeria.
Of the 55 million people facing crisis levels of food security in West Africa this year, 32 million are in Nigeria, up from 25 million last year, Stevenson said.
“The national food basket inflation [in Nigeria] is running at 40 percent yearly, which is the highest in 30 years or more and the highest food inflation in Africa right now,” he said.
During this month’s protests, demonstrators called on Tinubu to restore the gasoline and electricity subsidies. However, the president has urged protesters to be patient and wait for his reforms to pay dividends.
On Aug. 4, he said the government was ramping up spending on infrastructure projects, had started a loan scheme for university students and was building thousands of housing units across the 36 states.
Adeshiyan did not join protests in Lagos, because she feared they might turn violent, but many of her neighbors did.
“As I’m complaining that there is no food, they are complaining, and you can tell we have lost hope,” she said, pointing at empty food stalls on both sides of her street.
These days her grandchildren know not to expect three meals a day.
When the children cry for meat and refuse to eat the smoked cowhide — a tough, but cheaper alternative — that she serves with rice on Sundays, she feels unable to offer much comfort.
“I tell them Nigeria is not what it used to be. I let them know that they’re lucky to even have a meal in their belly,” she said.
In months, Lo Yuet-ping would bid farewell to a centuries-old village he has called home in Hong Kong for more than seven decades. The Cha Kwo Ling village in east Kowloon is filled with small houses built from metal sheets and stones, as well as old granite buildings, contrasting sharply with the high-rise structures that dominate much of the Asian financial hub. Lo, 72, has spent his entire life here and is among an estimated 860 households required to move under a government redevelopment plan. He said he would miss the rich history, unique culture and warm interpersonal kindness that defined life in
AERIAL INCURSIONS: The incidents are a reminder that Russia’s aggressive actions go beyond Ukraine’s borders, Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said Two NATO members on Sunday said that Russian drones violated their airspace, as one reportedly flew into Romania during nighttime attacks on neighboring Ukraine, while another crashed in eastern Latvia the previous day. A drone entered Romanian territory early on Sunday as Moscow struck “civilian targets and port infrastructure” across the Danube in Ukraine, the Romanian Ministry of National Defense said. It added that Bucharest had deployed F-16 warplanes to monitor its airspace and issued text alerts to residents of two eastern regions. It also said investigations were underway of a potential “impact zone” in an uninhabited area along the Romanian-Ukrainian border. There
The governor of Ohio is to send law enforcement and millions of dollars in healthcare resources to the city of Springfield as it faces a surge in temporary Haitian migrants. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine on Tuesday said that he does not oppose the Temporary Protected Status program under which about 15,000 Haitians have arrived in the city of about 59,000 people since 2020, but said the federal government must do more to help affected communities. On Monday, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost directed his office to research legal avenues — including filing a lawsuit — to stop the federal government from sending
Three sisters from Ohio who inherited a dime kept in a bank vault for more than 40 years knew it had some value, but they had no idea just how much until just a few years ago. The extraordinarily rare coin, struck by the US Mint in San Francisco in 1975, could bring more than US$500,000, said Ian Russell, president of GreatCollections, which specializes in currency and is handling an online auction that ends next month. What makes the dime depicting former US president Franklin D. Roosevelt so valuable is a missing “S” mint mark for San Francisco, one of just two
RSS