The African Democratic Congress (ADC) has accused President Bola Tinubu’s administration of creating what it described as a “government-created humanitarian disaster,” following reports that more than 17 million Nigerians are facing acute hunger across conflict-affected states in the country.
The opposition party said the worsening food crisis was the direct consequence of the Federal Government’s inability to tackle insecurity, protect farming communities and implement policies capable of reducing the rising cost of food.
The position was contained in a statement issued on Monday by the National Publicity Secretary of the ADC, Mallam Bolaji Abdullahi, in reaction to the latest assessment by the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), which indicated that over 17 million Nigerians are experiencing acute food insecurity.
According to the WFP, more than 17 million people across nine conflict-affected northern states are currently facing Crisis, Emergency or Catastrophic levels of food insecurity, representing an increase of nearly two million people from previous projections.
The report further stated that more than three million people in Borno State alone are acutely food insecure, while the combined figure for Borno, Adamawa and Yobe states has risen to 6.2 million.
Reacting to the report, the ADC said the findings were not opposition propaganda but the assessment of the world’s leading humanitarian agency on hunger.
“The African Democratic Congress (ADC) has received with profound concern the latest assessment by the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), which confirms that Nigeria is now facing one of its worst food security emergencies in almost a decade.
“These are not opposition figures. They are not campaign slogans. They are the findings of the world’s leading humanitarian agency on hunger,” the party stated.
The ADC argued that the WFP report clearly identified the causes of the food crisis, including expanding insecurity, attacks on farming communities, mass displacement, restricted humanitarian access and declining support for vulnerable populations.
It maintained that the crisis was not a natural disaster but a consequence of the APC-led administration’s inability to secure lives and farmlands.
“In other words, the hunger confronting millions of Nigerians today is not a natural disaster. It is an APC-inspired government-created humanitarian disaster.
“This humanitarian crisis is also the predictable outcome of a government that has failed to secure Nigerian lives, failed to protect Nigerian farmers and failed to address the cost-of-living crisis that it has created,” the statement said.
The party further criticised the Tinubu administration for repeatedly assuring Nigerians that the economic hardship would be temporary, saying the latest WFP assessment had confirmed that insecurity, declining agricultural production and soaring food inflation had continued to worsen.
“For three years, the Tinubu government has repeatedly told Nigerians that the pain we are experiencing is temporary. The WFP has now confirmed what Nigerians have been saying all along: insecurity is spreading, agricultural production is declining, food inflation is worsening and millions of Nigerians are being pushed deeper into hunger,” it added.
The ADC also faulted what it described as the government’s response to the humanitarian situation, accusing officials of denying the severity of the crisis while many Nigerians struggled to feed.
It said, “What makes this tragedy even more painful is that it has unfolded under a government whose priorities have been fundamentally misplaced. While millions of Nigerian families are struggling to eat even one meal a day and parents are forced to decide which child eats first, the Tinubu administration has kept its head in the clouds.
“Only recently, a spokesman for the administration denied the tragic reality of acute hunger in the country while government officials feed fat and live lives of obscene opulence.”
The opposition party insisted that Nigeria’s food crisis required a comprehensive national strategy rather than palliative measures, stressing that food security should be treated as a national security issue.
It noted that its manifesto places agriculture and food security at the centre of national security and economic policy, promising that an ADC-led government would make food security a permanent agenda of the National Security Council while coordinating interventions across the three tiers of government.
The party also pledged to prioritise smallholder farmers through investments in improved farm inputs, mechanisation, extension services and market access to boost food production and curb inflation.
In addition, it promised to reactivate Nigeria’s 264 abandoned dams to support all-year-round irrigation, reduce dependence on seasonal rainfall and increase agricultural productivity.
The ADC further pledged investments in aggregation centres, warehouses, cold-chain infrastructure and strategic grain reserves to reduce post-harvest losses, stabilise food prices and protect vulnerable households during periods of economic hardship.
According to the party, these proposals were already contained in its manifesto because it had long recognised that insecurity, food inflation and unemployment were interconnected consequences of poor governance.
“The WFP has now confirmed what millions of Nigerians already know from painful daily experience: hunger is spreading, insecurity is winning and this government has no plan,” the statement concluded.
