Former vice president Atiku Abubakar accused President Bola Tinubu on Wednesday, 7 October 2026, of abandoning domestic food growers while spending scarce foreign cash to bring in grain from abroad. Speaking to party delegates in Abuja, the opposition contender argued that state policies have crushed rural production, exposed farmers to rural gunmen, and turned Nigeria into a dumping ground for foreign harvests. Farmers cannot cultivate presidential promises. His sharp intervention strikes directly at the core of the administration’s macroeconomic adjustments, pointing out that official claims of an agricultural rebound crumble before the reality of prohibitive farm inputs and dangerous country roads.
State policy has priced local agriculture straight out of reach by removing fuel support and allowing the domestic currency to sink against global tender. Rural producers now spend fortunes to hire lorries, buy simple fertilisers, and haul harvested tubers to urban wholesale depots across the country. High petrol prices make haulage impossible. Instead of providing cheap credit or securing fertile valleys, the government in Abuja relies on temporary tariff holidays to bring in foreign wheat and maize. That choice leaves domestic grain silos empty while transferring vital jobs to overseas growers.
The country continues to ship out raw crops while buying back packaged groceries at ruinous retail prices. Foreign buyers take raw cashew nuts and unpeeled cocoa beans for tiny fees, process them in European factories, and capture the real commercial profits of the harvest. Nigeria loses the true value chain. Local processors struggle to run noisy diesel engines in industrial zones where commercial lenders charge punitive interest rates well above thirty per cent. The state taxes local output while opening border posts to subsidised foreign competitors.
The opposition figure pledged to introduce capped, auditable production subsidies for domestic refiners and local farm processors if voters hand him executive power next year. His plan directs public funds solely to goods produced within the country, excluding imported staples from state support to keep commercial jobs at home. Home production must always take priority. He warned that high domestic fuel charges ripple across cooking gas, food distribution, and factory costs, leaving ordinary wage earners too poor to buy basic staples in village squares.
The administration cannot build lasting food security by signing emergency customs waivers while armed bandits chase farming households off fertile land in the middle belt. Cheap imports offer a short sedative for angry city consumers, but they destroy the livelihoods of the millions who live by the hoe and the tractor. Short-term waivers build no granaries. Until the state secures rural farmlands, lowers transport bills, and finances domestic agro-allied processing hubs, the national dinner table will remain at the mercy of foreign ports and fluctuating shipping lanes.