Wake up and smell the coffee
Nigeria’s nutrition crisis is showing like mad
Good morning, Big Brains. If you read yesterday’s edition of the newsletter, you’d have seen Margaret signing off to rest for a bit and promising you’d be in good hands; my name is Chigor, and I’m the hands. Let’s get it.
- Chigor
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Let’s get into today’s edition:
Nigeria’s nutrition crisis is showing like mad
Nigeria's Deputy Governors are sick of the country’s porous borders
The Big Deal
Nigeria’s nutrition crisis is showing like mad
Most people are not lucky enough to be warned about future dangers, but Nigeria is not one of them. The country gets pretty consistent warnings about future disasters. This time around, the person doing the warning is the Special Adviser to President Bola Tinubu on Livestock Reforms, Professor Attahiru Jega, and it’s all about a potential protein deficit.
On Monday, June 30, while delivering a speech at the University of Ilorin titled The Political Economy of Livestock Development in Nigeria: Challenges and Prospects, Jega warned that Nigeria’s food insecurity is rising to the point where the country will experience a protein deficit.
If you’re wondering why Nigeria is predicted to experience this protein deficiency, it’s because of its projected population growth of about 400 million. In Jega’s words, “This demographic surge will necessitate a 253 per cent increase in poultry meat, a 117 per cent rise in beef, and a staggering 577 per cent expansion in milk production to satisfy domestic consumption requirements.”
And why is it challenging for Nigeria’s agricultural sector to produce enough protein for its growing population? — Jega said it’s because of outdated production systems, lack of policy coordination, all of which have been worsened by “the persistent scourge of violent farmer-herder conflicts, primarily driven by competition over increasingly scarce natural resources, exacerbated by climate change and poor land governance mechanisms.”
The solution, according to Jega, is the modernisation and commercialisation of the livestock sector.
Why is this a big deal?
For starters, Attahiru Jega’s point is valid; to avoid protein scarcity, Nigeria’s livestock production needs to match its projected population growth.
But what’s crazy is that even though we’ve not run into the predicted protein deficit era, millions of Nigerians cannot afford to eat protein, mostly because of one word— ✨poverty✨.
The Nigerian Protein Deficiency Report 2020 revealed that an estimated 92.7 million Nigerians are protein deficient because of poverty. More recently, in July 2024, nutritionists and paediatricians in the country reported seeing unusually high signs of malnutrition among patients because of protein deficiency, brought on by the high cost of protein-rich foods.
“We see that a lot of children are becoming stunted. They are becoming wasted and they are coming down with a lot of diseases because they don’t eat well,” a nutritionist told BusinessDay in 2024. This is especially sad to hear because the effects of something as seemingly temporary as malnutrition have long-term effects on the children who experience them and the country by extension.
For context, a 2017 article published in the International Journal of Epidemiology revealed (like many others before and after it) that “Undernutrition in childhood, primarily as measured by stunting or height-for-age, is consistently linked to worse economic outcomes as an adult.”
So, while we agree with Jega that the livestock sector needs to be modernised and commercialised, we wonder when the government will realise that it needs to take a more direct approach now to solving the country's already existing protein deficiency.
Nigeria's Deputy Governors are sick of the country’s porous borders
Speaking of problems that are known to have ripple effects, deputy governors across Nigeria’s border states are calling out the National Boundary Commission (NBC) for the lack of adequate security in the country’s borders.
Speaking on behalf of the governors at the 2025 African Border Day celebration in Abuja, the Deputy Governor of Sokoto State and Chairman of the Nigeria-Niger International Border Platform, Idris Gobir, told the federal government that it needs to do more to put Nigerian citizens first.
“We cannot compromise our security because of border relations. Other countries protect their borders, but we don’t at all. They fence their borders,” Gobir said.
Slamming the NBC’s incompetence, the governor also questioned why armed groups only live along the Nigerian side of the border, and not Niger’s.
The deputy governors of Bayelsa State and Ogun State also made similar statements, asking the NBC to do its one job— protect Nigerians. From suggesting the deployment of more Navy personnel to a collaboration with the National Assembly to release funds, the governors said in many words that they’re sick of having porous borders.
Are they right?
They’re absolutely right. The lack of adequate protection at Nigeria’s borders is causing the country so much harm. The most prominent is the smuggling of small arms into the country; these arms end up in the wrong hands and worsen already existing problems like the farmer-herder crisis in certain parts of the country.
In a recent interview with Zikoko Citizen on Nigeria’s porous borders, Attah Jesse Attah-Olottah, Risk Operations and Intelligence Coordinator at Beacon Security and Intelligence Limited (BSIL), suggested a lot of inter-agency collaborations.
“The Nigerian custom, for example, has an aerial asset, which it uses for its operation. The Nigerian immigration can collaborate with customs to utilise its aerial assets, which by the way is very underutilised in terms of border control and monitoring the fringes of the Nigerian border to stop and detect the movement of illegal persons and influx of weapons in the country,” he said.
We haven’t gotten our PHD yet, but we know that this suggestion, along with the suggestions from the deputy governors, will go a long way to protect our borders.
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