Nigeria declares a case of emergency as food and transportation prices soar

MICHAEL THOMAS michael@carib101.com TC REPORTER

Student’s stay at home and some adults are walking for miles to get to their destination all because of a hike in transportation fees. This comes as the Nigerian government claws back much-needed subsidizing money that goes to assist its citizens.

Africa’s most populous nation has seen a hike in the cost of food and transportation since the fuel subsidies ended. These subsidies cost approximately $10 billion dollars a year and made the country’s gasoline prices the cheapest globally.

The government has since declared a case of emergency countrywide. This state of emergency will allow the government to take exceptional steps to improve food security and supply, as skyrocketing prices are causing widespread hardship.

“The move will trigger a range of measures, including clearing forests for farmland to increase agricultural output and ease food inflation,” Dele Alake, a spokesman for President Bola Tinubu told reporters.

Following President Bola Tinubu’s removal of fuel subsidies and exchangerate reform, the naira fell by 40% after its peg to the dollar was removed. Even before Tinubu cut subsidies, consumer-price growth had accelerated to an almost 18year high of 22.4% in May in Nigeria.

Even though these cutbacks are causing problems in the streets, the stock prices have risen to their highest level in 15 years, and investors see the government’s decision on the currency as crucial when it comes to elevating economic growth.

Food takes up a huge part of the Nigerian household budget and currency weakness still adds pressure to the cost of living in the country. The World Bank fore - casts economic growth could quicken to 4% by 2024 from an average of 2% since 2015, yet Nigeria’s financial forecast does not look bright.

According to the International Monetary Fund, the price of food went up by more than 20% in sub-Saharan Africa between 2020 and 2022, partly reflecting global trends and the fact that the region imports many of its top staples.

The spokesman for the President said, “This has led to a significant drop in demand, thereby undermining the viability of the entire agriculture and food value chain.”

Ayo Teriba, the Chief Executive Officer of Economic Associates Ltd., a Lagosbased advisory firm revealed that cutting the subsidies might not be enough.

He believes the new government should declare an emergency in all sectors of the economy including power, security, and petroleum, as well as food, because they all need urgent attention.

A National Commodity Board will be created to continually review food costs, maintain a strategic reserve, and moderate spikes and dips in prices while the central bank will continue its funding of the farming sector.

The Nigerian government plans to release 500,000 hectares from land banks, which includes clearing forested areas to increase available farmland and boost the food supply.

Long periods of insecurity and recent floods in the country’s north-central region (which is very instrumental in food production) have reduced farming outputs, which in turn have led to a spike in food prices nationwide.

According to a report by Mercy Corps (a humanitarian organization operating in the area) price hikes can be seen in food costs in Borno State in Northern Nigeria, where prices jumped 36% and transportation fares 78%, just one week after the subsidies were cut. This has led to an increase in hunger and petty theft at the community level.

After reading the report and assessing the situation I am left to wonder how much of this is natural, and how much is planned?

July has been so hot that scientists calculate that this month will be the hottest globally on record and likely the warmest human civilization has seen.

The World Meteorological Organization and the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service have reported that earth’s temperature has been temporarily passing over a key warming threshold. Temperatures are 1.5 degrees warmer than pre-industrial times for a record 16 days this month. Scientists say that such shattering of heat records is a precursor for future climate-altering changes as the planet warms. They claim that the changes go beyond just prolonged heat waves and include more flooding, longerburning wildfires and extreme weather events that put many people at risk.

There are droughts happening all over the world: Spain, which is going through yet another heat wave this year, one so extreme that virtually no aspect of daily life has been left untouched. Dishes are left unwashed overnight when water allowances run out. Cows raised for gourmet meat risk going thirsty. Tourists heading to a water sports destination are met with hard mud. These stark scenes present themselves as Europe endures its driest period in at least 500 years.

In Dubrovnik, Croatia’s top tourist destination, strong winds prevented the deployment of aircraft. The fire was under control as of Wednesday. In France more than 300 firefighters were battling to contain fires near the city of Arles last Tuesday, while several more fires broke out in southwestern France and the southern Bouches-du-Rhone department was placed under a “red alert. 61 wildfires have erupted across Greece. The blazes killed two people in the coastal area of Magnesia, north of Athens and forced a new wave of evacuations. Finally, in Italy firefighters battled nearly 1,400 fires between Sunday and Tuesday, including 650 in Sicily and 390 in Calabria. Three elderly people died in the region of Palermo, in Sicily. Another 98-year-old man was killed as fire consumed his home in Calabria.

The climate seems to be going crazy at times, and if you had a chance to read last edition’s cover story Don’t Play God Part I, you will see that I presented information that points towards global leaders, and large corporations being solely responsible for all the damage that is happening in our world currently.

Geoengineering is a new concept, and many of its initiatives only exist on theoretical or small-scale terms. This of course poses certain drawbacks and introduces unknown climate risks. Geoengineering projects have been altering earth’s systems in unintended ways. Since the side effects of iron seeding or aerosol injections cannot be fully known unless put into practice, these initiatives present moral hazards to scientists.

Furthermore, geoengineering could have significant levels of uncertainty and risk with respect to its impact on the: global climate system, natural ecosystems, weather patterns, biodiversity, economic sustainability and other considerations such as human rights. These possible risks and impacts carry significant uncertainties and have governance and ethical implications.

All of the factors have added fuel to the smoldering disagreements among climate scientists, creating what is likely the most significant rift in the world of atmospheric science and climate studies in years. Academic factions have published a series of dueling petitions as part of an increasingly visible and contentious battle for control of the scientific narrative— and ultimately over how to tackle climate change as emissions continue to rise. One side says that humanity may doom itself by refusing to look into potential chemical means of cooling our atmosphere. The other claims that undertaking such research could lead to disastrous consequences that we can barely imagine.

The role of large corporations

It is why some scientists are saying that geoengineering should not be seen as a substitute for action to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adaptation to the adverse effects of climate change. Interestingly enough, the mainstream media is pushing this agenda, highlighting all the reasons why there needs to be more done when it comes to dealing with climate control. What I don’t understand is why they continue to focus on the actions of individuals like you and I, when the real damage is being inflicted by large corporations.

As people around the globe have become increasingly exposed to the impacts of our climate crisis, the entities with perhaps the most power to stop the crisis are being protected. According to selfreported numbers, the top 15 U.S. food and beverage companies generate nearly 630 million metric tons of greenhouse gases every year. That makes this group of only 15 companies a bigger emitter than Australia, the world’s 15th largest annual source of greenhouse gases.

Let’s take a moment to look at how this all works. When a company makes a product, that product requires raw materials that created their own emissions during harvest, extraction, refining, etc. (known as upstream emissions); and when a consumer uses that product, there are further emissions that come from the product’s use and eventual disposal (known as downstream emissions). Failing to account for, or address these emissions means that the vast majority of greenhouse gases attributable to corporations and their products are falling outside of well-publicized corporate climate commitments. In other words, the impact of these corporations is being ignored. Corporations, with their outsized influence and power in today’s world, have an even larger role to play. They are able to drive policy change, shape consumer preferences, and rapidly respond to the necessities of climate change at a scale and pace beyond any other political or private entity. As some of the entities most responsible for putting us in the crisis we’re in today, it’s time for companies to take full responsibility for their climate footprints.

Why haven’t scientists come forward?

Put quite simply, there is a gag order on scientists. The public has been trained and conditioned to believe that federal agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) exist to watch over them and warn them of any potential dangers. This notion could not be further from the truth. These institutions as a whole exist to hide threats from the population, not to disclose them. We continue to convince ourselves that if there was really anything they should be concerned about, our world leaders would tell us. Again, this could not be further from the truth.

One scientist has come out, and because of his stance he was fired. Michael Davis is now a former EPA Environmental Engineer who is currently working with GeoengineeringWatch.org. Michael was recently terminated from the EPA for telling the truth about two extremely dire public dangers: the highly toxic fallout from geoengineering, and the willful contamination of the public water supply with industrial waste.

He was terminated for raising the issues of anthropogenic deposition of aluminum due to atmospheric geoengineering. In addition, he brought up the industrial hazardous waste byproduct of fluoride known as HFSA (being sold primarily by the phosphate fertilizer and aluminum industries) to drinking water utilities for disposal into America’s drinking water systems.

The EPA like other governmental regulatory agencies are corrupt to the core, completely dysfunctional and have been completely hijacked by the multinational corporations. The “P” in EPA stands for protection of corporate profits and not for protecting human, animal and environmental (or biosphere) health.

It’s hard to find any scientist who will honestly say that solar geoengineering should be deployed anytime soon — or ever. Although reflective particles already make their way into the atmosphere (both from aerosol pollution and volcanic dust and ash), purposefully altering the skies already pumped full of carbon dioxide seems misguided at best — and disastrous at worst. Solar geoengineering isn’t a true climate change “solution.”

Is climate change a hoax? It depends on where you are getting your information from, and whether you are able to analytically read between the lines. As information consumers, we have to really take the time to decipher real from fake, which can be difficult at times. What I do know is that something is not right; are we really open to trusting individuals (world leaders) who at the end of the day are pushing an agenda that serves them. Something to think about.

One of the most important decisions you’ll ever make in life is deciding who to trust. I know that we all have a story where trusting the wrong person has gone wrong. Trusting the wrong person can result in abusive relationships, being taken advantage of, financial losses, and many more undesirable outcomes.

This week, I want to share a newer development that has not been discussed readily, but what it does is put us, the citizens of the world, in a position where we are forced to trust leaders who may not have our best interest at heart. Unfortunately, our history has presented us leaders who manipulate people to follow them, even when it’s not in the followers’ economic or other interests. They do this by using emotion and identity to attract and manipulate their followers. They define in-group and out-group by manipulating emotions, especially fear, anger, and outrage. Through emotional per- suasion, leaders get followers to adhere to a particular partisan identity, and they emphasize that by sticking with them, followers can avoid harm.

In recent years, concern has been expressed in both scholarly and popular literature about the dangers of scientific developments that could be used to control and manipulate human behavior. There are fears that behavioral techniques have advanced to such an extent that they threaten the fundamental values of Western civilization.

It is one of the reasons that when I found out that The Rockefeller Foundation announced it had partnered with the World Health Organization (“WHO”) “To expand global pandemic preparedness in an era of climate change,” the alarms in my head went off! We have seen how our global leaders have used manipulation to evoke trust during the pandemic, actions that have caused severe harm to many of us. Let’s take a look at what they have in store for us.

The Rockefeller Foundation launched the partnership with the WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence on the sidelines of the 76th World Health Assembly (“WHA”). The Seventy-sixth World Health Assembly was held in Geneva, Switzerland, from May 21st–30th, 2023. The World Health Assembly is the decision-making body of WHO. It is attended by delegations from all WHO Member States and focuses on a specific health agenda prepared by the Execu-