Nigerians have surprisingly reacted with remarkable aloofness to the recent “state of emergency” on food security announced by the President Bola Ahmed Tinubu government.

This might be due to the sub-optimal strategy in unveiling the all-important policy. Given the level of hunger in the land, such a crucial policy should have been announced by the president himself rather than delegating it to a spokesman.

Government spokespersons have come to be seen as spin doctors who cannot be relied upon to uphold integrity, honour and dignity in the discharge of their duties. A word from the president is miles ahead of those of his official megaphones.

That aside, the package itself as announced by Tinubu’s Special Adviser on Special Duties, Communication and Strategy, Dele Alake, is quite rich. It contains the immediate, medium and long term strategies to revive agriculture and ensure food security. It will involve the recharging of all Federal Government’s agricultural and water resources mechanisms to ensure year-round farming.

Commodity Boards and Commodity Exchanges will be created, along with food reserves, to ensure year-round food availability and attract investment. All the 11 River Basin authorities will be resuscitated, the existing 500,000 hectares of “land bank” activated and massive mechanisation of agriculture rolled out. What gladdens the heart even more is the deployment of the armed forces and security agencies to all theatres of criminal violence where terrorists, bandits, armed herdsmen, armed separatists and other hoodlums have been disrupting farming activities and livelihoods.

Without the elimination of these criminals from our ungoverned spaces, any emergency on food security will be a wasted effort as we saw in the Muhammadu Buhari era. Our troops must be fully supported to secure this country and allow its people to resume their normal lives.

This is the best time for any administration to embark on a noble and ambitious policy of this scale. It is a welcome departure from Buhari who waited for six and half years before launching what he called “lifting 100 million Nigerians out of poverty”, in October 2021. Nothing came of it. Tinubu has enough time to make the emergency on food security succeed or fail and be properly assessed.

The situation facing the country, the mass suffering arising from harsh policies, needs urgent government response.

This is the kind of “palliative” we want government to invest the N500 billion and $800 million World Bank loan in, not cash transfers. If the emergency policy is properly implemented, Nigeria will be food secure.

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