Governance by alternative facts

Since 2017, the government has been trumpeting its success in increasing local rice production. Such was the feeling of pride that the president made it a special theme in his 2018 New Year address to the nation where he claimed Nigeria has almost attained self-sufficiency in rice production and boasted that importation of rice will be completely stopped this year.

We were quick to remind the president that although punitive tariffs have rolled back rice importation through the seas and land borders, the reality is that parboiled rice (consumed mainly by Nigerians) importation has risen exponentially in our neighbouring countries and virtually all of these rice find their way into Nigeria, where it is even difficult to see local rice in the market.

But the government refused to listen and continued to believe and glory in its own facts – that it has stopped rice importation and is on its way to making Nigeria self-sufficient in rice production. The minister of agriculture even took the joke too far at a meeting of the Presidential Fertilizer Initiative (PFI) and the Fertiliser Producers and Suppliers of Nigeria (FEPSAN) presided over by president Muhammadu Buhari where he claimed Nigeria’s import from Thailand has decline by about 95 percent and has led to the collapse of seven rice mills in Thailand and raised unemployment rate to four percent in the country.  Ogbeh was quoted as saying:

 “… two weeks ago, the Ambassador of Thailand came to my office and said to me that we have really dealt with them…But I asked what did we do wrong and he said unemployment in Thailand was one of the lowest in the world, 1.2 per cent, it has gone up to four per cent because seven giant rice mills have shut down because Nigeria’s import has fallen by 95 per cent on rice alone.”

However, a simple check reveals that both the president and minister of agriculture were greatly mistaken and the figures they advertised were not true. First, Thailand’s rice export has been on a continuous growth trajectory, reaching a record high of 11.2 million tonnes last year. Data shows rice exports grew at 37.2 percent year-on-year.

Information available on the Rice Exporters Association of Thailand website shows Nigeria’s import of rice for the last three years has been negligible – 58, 260, 644, 131 and 23, 192 metric tonnes in 2015, 2016 and 2017 respectively.

Second, the unemployment figure in Thailand stands at 1.3 percent as at January 2018. So, it is neither true that rice mills have been shut down due to Nigeria’s low imports nor that unemployment figure has gone up to four percent in Thailand.

But despite these facts being made available to the government, it stubbornly refused to listen and continued to peddle its own facts.

Unable to take the lies further, the Ambassador of Thailand to Nigeria had to openly fault the minister’s account of events.

Earlier this month, the United States Department of Agriculture busted the government’s bubble again when it released figures showing that rather than reducing, Nigeria’s rice import has rather increased and is projected to jump next year to 3.4 million metric tons, making Nigeria the world’s second biggest rice importer after China. Still, the government refused to accept the reality arguing very blindly and foolishly that all it knows is that those rice came into the country illegally and cannot be counted as real imports into Nigeria. How childish!

The government cannot continue to peddle and believe its own facts different from what is real and acceptable world-wide. Granted this is a political season and the government is desperate to sell itself and trumpet its achievements, it must be guided by respect for concrete facts and data on the ground and stop the constant embarrassment it causes the country by its peddling of rumours, half-truths and sometimes outright lies just to score cheap political points.