Food Imports for Nigeria

Pictures from the Past

Our younger son Sam is here for 2 1/2 weeks with us. It’s fun to have him around. I went early to church on Sunday to prepare for singing with the choir. Sam brought Clem later. Our friend Jane took the picture for us in the church foyer after the service.

Sam’s been working with an editor in Nigeria to get Clem’s book on Nigerian electricity published. The other night we began looking through old photo albums to find pictures to use in the book.

Clem was really shocked and thrilled when we brought out the oldest photo album. He was sure we had lost all the old photos in the early days of the Biafran War.

We had to leave Enugu, Biafra’s first capital, quickly in 1967 as the Nigerian army was approaching. So we didn’t have time to pack carefully, nor could we take everything. I don’t recall grabbing the two oldest albums – our wedding photos, and one I had assembled from Clem’s earlier days – to the village, but I must have! They’ve been stored in a cupboard for ages.

We found some from his days at secondary school, his beloved Dennis Memorial Grammar School.

The University College Ibadan is the site of several pictures, and he was able to remember many names of people in the photos with him. Then we found some from his time at Leeds University in England where he did his engineering degree. One shows the three competitors for the top academic achievement in the set of eleven students; Clem was the only African.

The photos from his earlier days in school made him very happy. And the pictures from his first days at Nigeria’s Electricity Corporation are wonderful. All of them will certainly enliven his book.

CNN African Voices

I don’t recall seeing Arit Okpo when I was in Nigeria last Christmas. But I wasn’t really paying much attention. Still, I’m pleased to see that she’ll be the host of CNN’s African Voices. I’ll look for it now.

https://brittlepaper.com/2019/08/nigerian-journalist-presenter-arit-okpo-is-new-host-of-cnns-african-voices/

She announced her new role on Twitter, of course, saying “I am the host of #CNNAfricanVoicesChangemakers, She describes it as, “A new chapter of CNN African Voices celebrating the people innovating, advocating and making a difference on the continent.”

Nigeria to Stop Importing Food

President Buhari has instructed Nigeria’s Central Bank to stop providing foreign exchange for food imports, according to several articles I read. One is from Legit online.

The country currently imports significant amounts of rice and other essential food items, running into many billions of dollars. But Buhari says, “Foreign reserve will be used strictly for diversification of the economy and not for encouraging more dependence on foreign food.” He noted the push of the last few years to encourage agriculture.

The country has plenty of arable land and hard-working farmers. It should be able to provide food for its 90 million people.

There are a few large-scale agricultural operations. But so far they come no where need meeting the demand. The dependence on oil revenue and the plentiful foreign exchange for many years meant that little attention was paid to agriculture.

How successful will the effort this time be, I wonder?

I can’t help but remember the ban on importation of fabric in the 1980s in a bid to preserve foreign exchange and encourage local manufacturing. Yet for my clothing business I bought imported fabrics in the large markets across the street from Nigeria’s Central Bank. No matter what the CBN said, it was completely unable to stop the importers who used black market foreign exchange to bring in the products that consumers wanted to buy.