When we talk about the strength of a country, we usually point to things we can see. Power stations and their capacity, the density and connectivity of road networks, the lethality of military arsenals and the strength of human population. We also obsess over the social contract between the government and the governed as a philosophical idea that binds citizens to the state through laws and institutions. We reduce them into obligations while we often forget the most basic responsibility of all: people must be able to eat and stay alive. Before rules, loyalty, legitimacy, or institutions can matter, the state has to meet this basic human need. If it fails at that, everything else becomes brittle.
Before a citizen can vote, before they can pay taxes, and before they can obey the law, they must eat. That is the most basic demand of life.
February 2012 was the first time I heard of the concept called food insecurity and from that very day till now, I dare say that the global discourse on food insecurity and specifically the Nigerian discourse has been trapped in the humanitarian ghetto. We see hunger through images of individual suffering, pitiful appeals for philanthropic charity, and the moral language of aid and dependence. While valid, this perspective commits a grave strategic error. It obscures the terrifying reality that food systems are the bedrock of national order and stability.
I strongly believe that food is infrastructure. And I do not mean stomach infrastructure. It is the biological energy grid of the nation. And when this grid fails, the state does not just face a humanitarian crisis but an existential threat. Hunger is a strategic vulnerability that weakens national borders. Interestingly, it has the capacity to radicalise a people, and can erode the very legitimacy of governance.
To understand the future of the Nigerian state and indeed, the stability of the African continent, we must stop treating food and allied matters as subjects in the agriculture sector and start treating it as an integral part of national security. We must recognize the causal chain: hunger drives migration, migration strains urban infrastructure, and that strain creates the vacuum in which instability and insurgency thrive.
The capacity to feed the population is the ultimate test of State Capacity.
The Strategic Role of Food
The legitimacy of any state rests on a Caloric Bargain. It is an unspoken agreement that, in exchange for the monopoly on violence and the collection of taxes, the state will maintain an environment where survival is affordable and reasonably attainable. When the price of basic sustenance exceeds the economic bandwidth of the average citizen, that bargain is broken.
In as much as we are used to seeing the national grid collapse, we understand implicitly that if the national power grid collapses for a month, the state is in peril. Industries will suffer, our dwindling production is likely to halt, communication will suffer a coma, and darkness will become a breeding ground for chaos and anarchy. We must see our food supply chains with the same architectural severity. The food system is a just-in-time logistics network that keeps chaos at bay, one meal at a time.
When this biological grid fails, the consequences are quite kinetic.
- A state that cannot facilitate the feeding of its people loses its moral authority. When citizens spend 80% of their income on survival, they have zero capital left to invest in the state; be it financial or political. They will no longer see the government as a protector but a predator and monster.
- Just as a cyber-attack on a central bank is an act of war, the systemic neglect of food supply chains creates a vulnerability that adversaries (both internal and external) can exploit. A reliance on food imports is a tactical surrender of our sovereignty. It outsources our national stability to the volatility of the global market and the whims of foreign exchange.
In the Nigerian context, where the margin for error is razor-thin, treating food inflation only as a macroeconomic indicator is a failure of statecraft. It is, in reality, a warning light on the dashboard of national stability.
Mechanisms of Instability: The Feedback Loop
How does a caloric deficit translate into a security crisis? It is not immediate. It is a slow-moving, grinding feedback loop involving three distinct phases: Displacement, Friction, and Radicalisation.
1. The Migration Accelerator
When rural food systems collapse, whether due to climate shock, banditry, or failed policy, the rural population does not simply starve in silence. They move towards safety. It is safe to say that hunger is one of the greatest engines of migration in human history.
This triggers demographic compression. We see massive rural-urban drift just as we are currently seeing. Sadly, this is not drawn by the pull of industrial opportunity, but pushed by the push of desperation. These migrants arrive in Lagos, Ibadan, Port Harcourt, or Kano with no assets and no skills for the urban economy. They overcrowd the slums, overwhelm sanitation systems, and stretch policing capacities to the breaking point. The food crisis of the village becomes the crime crisis of the city.
2. Resource Friction: The Herder-Farmer Misdiagnosis
In the hinterlands, food insecurity changes the calculus of survival, leading to what I call Resource Friction. The most visceral example is the Herder-Farmer crisis affecting the Middle Belt and increasingly the South West.
Mainstream narratives often misdiagnose this as solely an ethnic or religious conflict. While those identity markers are present, they are accelerants, and not the root cause. At its core, this is a Malthusian resource war. It is a conflict driven by shrinking land and water availability for food production. When the grass dries up and the grain runs out, hunger forces competition. And competition, in the absence of strong and systemic state mediation, invariably turns violent. Unfortunately, these kinds of scenarios make the AK-47 a tool of agricultural acquisition.
3. The Insurgency Dividend
Perhaps most dangerously, food insecurity acts as a recruitment sergeant for non-state armed groups. Insurgencies thrive where the state is absent. By offering food and/or the money to buy it, extremist groups step into the vacuum.
When the state offers austerity and the insurgent offers bread, the loyalty of the starving shifts. We cannot bomb our way out of an insurgency that is fueled by a broken food system. Every time a farm is abandoned due to fear, the insurgency wins a tactical victory against the state’s economy.
The Science of Measurement
For us to move beyond anecdotes and truly fix these systems, we must strip away the emotion and look at the math. State Capacity is way beyond the idea of leveraging power and authority over the governed. It is a variable. And as a political economy thinker, I argue that we must apply rigorous econometric methodologies to food security.
We need to stop guessing if our policies work and start calculating the coefficients of survival.
Consider the evaluation of a policy like the Secure Corridor initiative which deploys military assets to protect grain transport routes. To measure its success, we cannot just look at raw prices. We must employ a Difference-in-Differences (DiD) framework.
If we deploy security forces to the Benue valley as a treatment to the issue, and leave a similar region in a neighboring state with standard policing control, does the price volatility in Benue significantly decrease relative to the control group? If it is negative and statistically significant, we can then conclude that we have empirical proof that security is a deflationary force.
This level of rigour is currently absent from our national planning for food. We launch interventions without the data architecture to track their real-world impact on the last mile consumer. Like we did with the Anchor Borrowers’ Programme, we fly our plane blinds.
Policy Implications for Nigeria
If we accept the thesis that food is infrastructure, our policy architecture must undergo a radical renovation. Nigeria’s current approach of treating agriculture as a welfare scheme or a conduit for political patronage is a national security risk. And to effectively transition from that fragile state to being resilient, we must operationalize three doctrinal shifts:
The Return of the Board
Nigeria has historically oscillated between rigid price controls and chaotic free-market volatility. Neither approach has delivered stability. We do not need the government to become the farmer. We need the government to be a steady anchor for every stakeholder and player within the sector.
This requires the establishment of a modernised National Commodity Exchange and Regulatory Board. Unlike the Marketing Boards of the 1970s which taxed farmers to finance the state, this institution must be anchored in strategic reserve management.
It should operate like a Central Bank for food. It buys excess produce during harvest to prevent price crashes as a means of protecting the farmer’s income and releases stocks during lean periods to curb inflation as a means of protecting the citizen’s survival.
The capacity to manage these reserves with transparency and discipline is the clearest litmus test of the Nigerian state’s administrative competence.
The Securitisation of the Green Belt
We must integrate agricultural zones into our national defense architecture. It is unfortunate that ungoverned spaces that house our forests and arable lands have become headquarters for banditry.
The recent operationalisation of a Forest Guard structure marks an important step. Such forces must function as a strategic force, with a clear mandate to hold territory in high-yield agricultural zones. If we protect oil pipelines because they are economic assets, we must protect grain corridors because they are survival assets. The loss of one harvest in the North East should be treated with the same severity as a pipeline breach in the Niger Delta.
Data Sovereignty
Finally, we need a Food Systems Intelligence tool. Relying on NBS data that is months old is insufficient for a security crisis. We need real-time GIS mapping, satellite imagery of crop health, and market-level econometric monitoring. We cannot manage what we do not measure. A lack of data on national food inventory is a blind spot in our national defense.
Conclusion
The 21st century will not be defined solely by who controls the microchips or the AI algorithms. It will be defined by who can maintain social cohesion in the face of volatile climate and resource shocks.
Hunger is the clearest lens through which we must assess the true capacity of the Nigerian state. A government may command a powerful military, maintain a robust diplomatic corps, and enjoy a soaring GDP, but if its food systems are fragile, the state is built on sinking sand.
We must reframe the narrative. Securing the food system is an act of self-preservation. It is the first duty of the sovereign. When this truth is fully recognised, commitment to resilience ceases to be optional. It becomes nonn-negotiable.
A state that cannot feed itself cannot govern itself. And the architecture of national survival begins with the security of its harvest.
