By Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Before the cock crows in a village outside Makurdi, Terkaa is already awake. He has three children of his own and, since his brother was killed on the road to the farm last year, two more who now call him father. Five mouths wait on one hoe.
He no longer goes to the far farm. That is where the men with guns come. So he plants the small plot behind the house and prays the yams will be enough.
They will not be enough.
The hand that feeds a nation now goes to bed hungry.
A FARM WITHOUT FERTILISER, A HOME WITHOUT FOOD
This season Terkaa came back from the market with half the fertiliser he needed. Diesel for the pump became a luxury after 29 May 2023, when a new President announced from the podium that subsidy was gone. No plan, no cushion, no warning. The bus fare to carry his harvest to town swallowed the profit before the yams were sold. What he could not sell, his family ate. What they could not eat, rotted.
His eldest daughter should be in her final year of secondary school. She now fries bean cakes by the roadside with her mother. When his youngest son burned with fever in the rainy season, Terkaa carried him to the health centre and found the door open but no nurse inside. He paid for the drugs by selling the goat he had kept for the next planting.
At night, when the children sleep, his wife asks the question every farming mother in Nigeria now asks: what will we eat when the yams finish? Terkaa has no answer. He only knows that three years ago the question did not come so early in the year.
He is not alone. In Ekiti, Baba Olowookere’s cocoa farm still produces, but it no longer pays school fees for his five children, and two of his sons now push trucks in Lagos. In Ebonyi, Mama Nneka, widowed at thirty eight, grows rice with four children beside her, sells at a loss to the middleman and buys back rice for her own table at a price she cannot bear. In Okene, an Ebira yam farmer with six children leaves for the farm in a group of ten, because no man walks alone to his own land any more. In southern Kaduna, a Fulani herdsman and a Hausa maize farmer who have shared a boundary for twenty years now share the same fear, and both have paid levies to armed men to reach their fields.
These are not strangers. They are the same Nigerian, living the same misery in different languages.
Food inflation stood at 17.52 per cent in June 2026. The World Bank counts roughly 6 in every 10 Nigerians as poor. The minimum wage of 70,000 naira is worth about 47 dollars, and the farmer earns no wage at all. He earns only what the weather, the bandits and the market leave him.
MEANWHILE, IN ABUJA
While Terkaa counts yams, the government counts aircraft. A new Airbus A330 joined the presidential fleet in August 2024. A presidential yacht line surfaced in the 2023 supplementary budget. Lawmakers took delivery of sport utility vehicles reported at about 160 million naira apiece. The Senate President was caught on camera announcing a token sent to senators’ accounts so they could enjoy their holiday. This very month, the President has been reported enjoying an extended European holiday in Paris.
Then there is the ministry created for people like Terkaa. In January 2024, Tinubu suspended his Minister of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Alleviation, Betta Edu, over an alleged 585 million naira transfer of public funds into a private account, an allegation she has denied. More than two years on, the EFCC has announced no conclusion. Yet today Betta Edu sits on Tinubu’s 2027 campaign council as Director of Women Mobilisation. Funds meant for the poorest Nigerians became a scandal, and the scandal became a campaign post. Mama Nneka, a widow with four children, is now to be mobilised by the woman who held the purse of poverty alleviation.
One government, two Nigerias. In one, the convoy. In the other, a footpath to a farm a man is too afraid to visit.
A farmer does not ask for luxury. He asks for a road, a price and a peaceful night.
WHAT ATIKU WILL CHANGE FOR TERKAA
The ADC candidate, Atiku Abubakar, has placed a 12 point policy commitment before Nigerians, and it reads like a letter to the farmer’s household.
It secures farming communities, lowers production costs and opens finance to farmers. It brings a targeted petrol subsidy to cut transport costs, reviews the student loan scheme with consideration of forgiveness, overhauls basic healthcare with the nurses and doctors the village lacks, and recruits and properly equips more security personnel.
It pays local government funds directly to the councils, creates a 10 billion dollar startup fund with a greater share of opportunity for youths and women, reopens land borders to legitimate trade, revives the Port Harcourt, Calabar and Warri ports, reforms electricity tariffs, implements the Oronsaye Report and devolves real power to the states.
Read it through the eyes of the households we have met. Security and farm finance send Terkaa back to his far field. Cheaper transport lets Mama Nneka carry her rice to market herself instead of surrendering it to the middleman. The startup fund gives Baba Olowookere’s sons a reason to come home from Lagos. A clinic with a nurse means no farmer sells his planting goat to save his child. Direct council funds put a road where the Ebira farmer now walks in a group of ten.
ANSWERING THE CRITICS
The critics have spoken. Let them be answered one by one.
ARBITERZ: WHO WILL PAY FOR IT?
Arbiterz asks what the programme will cost and who will pay. Ask first who has been paying. The Finance Minister himself admitted this July that subsidy savings were swallowed by debt servicing. The money was taken from Terkaa and never came back to him.
Nigeria is not too poor to fund 12 commitments. It has been too leaky. Close the leaks, merge the duplicated agencies Oronsaye identified, and the cost of relief becomes the cheapest bill Nigeria will ever pay. A farmer who returns to his far field pays tax on a bigger harvest. A son who builds a business with startup capital stops pushing trucks and starts employing others. Relief that restores production pays for itself. The dearest bill is the one Terkaa is paying now.
OLU FASAN: A KITCHEN SINK OF POPULISM?
Olu Fasan in Vanguard calls the agenda a kitchen sink. But the farmer’s misery is itself a kitchen sink. Insecurity keeps him off the land, fuel raises his transport cost, a shut border kills his market, a clinic without a nurse takes his goat, and school fees take his daughter. Fix one and leave the others, and he still starves.
A one term President is precisely the man who must arrive with a complete plan, because he has no second term in which to learn. As for poetry without prose, Atiku wrote his prose as chairman of the National Economic Council and the National Council on Privatisation, when Nigeria’s economy grew from 58 billion dollars in 1999 to 270 billion dollars in 2007.
And if the Oronsaye Report is outdated, Mr Fasan should ask why the Tinubu government itself announced its adoption in February 2024. Nigerians are still waiting for the leaner government it promised.
APC’S BOLARINWA: DESPERATE AND EMPTY?
The APC chieftain calls the document empty, then claims the port revival, education reform and local government autonomy as his own party’s work. A document cannot be empty and worth stealing at the same time.
If those reforms were truly alive under Tinubu, Terkaa would feel them. His council would have fixed the road to the far farm. His health centre would have a nurse. His daughter would be in school. Desperation is not a candidate publishing his plans before a vote. Desperation is a government claiming credit for relief nobody has received, while it hands a campaign post to a minister it once suspended over funds meant for the poor.
THE HARVEST OF 16 JANUARY
Terkaa cannot fight bandits or buy an aircraft. He cannot argue with the Central Bank or summon a minister. But on 16 January 2027 he holds what Abuja fears most: his thumb. So does Baba Olowookere. So does Mama Nneka. So do the Ebira farmer, the Fulani herdsman and the Hausa maize grower.
They will be told, in the weeks ahead, that the hardship is the price of reform and that relief is around the corner. They have heard it for three planting seasons. The corner never came. A farmer does not judge a season by the promises of the rainmaker. He judges it by what is in the barn.
The farmer knows better than anyone that what you plant is what you reap. Nigeria planted hardship in 2023. On 16 January, the suffering millions will plant something new.
#Atiku2027 #ADC #TheFarmerVotesAtiku
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General, The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
17 September 2026
