The shockwaves began the moment word spread from the State House: a 50-kilogram bag of parboiled rice, once groaning at ₦120,000, now hovers near ₦59,000....CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE READING.>>
After meeting President Bola Tinubu, BUA Group chairman Abdul Samad Rabiu hailed last year’s duty waivers on key staples—rice, wheat, maize and flour—as the masterstroke behind the sudden crash.
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!For months, analysts blamed soaring food costs on two culprits: hoarding cartels and a currency slide that tempted producers to smuggle crops into neighbouring franc-zone markets. Customs, EFCC and Immigration mounted joint crackdowns, impounding articulated trucks crammed with Nigerian-grown rice headed for Niger and Benin.
The presidency eventually released some cargos on one ironclad condition: every grain must be sold inside Nigeria.
Rumblings from smugglers turned into groans as warehouses of “locked-up” stock were forced onto the market, sending prices into free-fall.
Yet policy mattered as much as policing. Tinubu’s waiver erased import duties on milled rice and raw paddy, slicing overheads for local millers starved of affordable inputs. Lagos’ 32-tonne-per-hour Imota Mill—struggling for paddy—can now import cheaper grain to ignite its turbines, a move experts say could drag prices toward ₦45,000 by Christmas.
“Demurrage and tariff relief shaved nearly a third off our landing cost,” a private mill manager in Kano confirmed. “We passed the savings straight to distributors, and the street felt it within weeks.”
Still, Babajide Otitoju, the television analyst whose quip headlines this piece, warns the victory is fragile. Rogue middlemen may regroup; state governments must double down on extension services and irrigation to lift yields ahead of the wet-season planting. Banks, too, face scrutiny.
Rabiu urged lenders to invest profits back into agriculture or risk “naming and shaming” for stashing trillions while farmers beg for single-digit loans.
Market surveys already show ripple effects: maize has dropped from ₦60,000 to ₦30,000 per 100-kg bag; flour slid to ₦55,000. Pharmacists lobby for similar waivers on active pharmaceutical ingredients, arguing that drugs for hypertension and malaria now rival school fees.
For now, though, shoppers clutching new-season rice bask in a rare headline that sounds like hyperbole but feels like relief—proof that prices truly can fall as fast as they once rose.
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