Fact check: FG fails to crash food prices in 2 weeks
Disturbed by skyrocketing prices of foodstuff in the markets, the Federal Government early June said it will crash the costs in two weeks.
Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Audu Ogbeh, reportedly said in an interview published in a national daily on June 7, 2017 that plans were on to reduce prices of food items across the country.
Ogbeh, who is also the chairman of the Presidential Task Force on soaring prices of foodstuffs, reportedly made the comments relying on the underground work done by the committee to push down prices of foodstuffs in the markets.
“The Federal Government will intervene on the prices of rice and other commodities in the next two weeks,” the minister reportedly said.
One month after, Daily Trust carried out a fact check to verify if the Federal Government succeeded in crashing the prices in two weeks as promised by the minister.
The check relied on the Selected Food Price Watch data for June 2017 released by the nation’s apex statistical body, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).
Since the promise to crash the prices was made before July 7, it was expected that foodstuff prices would have dipped before the end of June, being three weeks interval between the time of the promise and the end of the month.
Analysis of the Selected Food Price Watch data for June 2017 showed that the Federal Government did not only fail to crash foodstuff prices, but was also unable to keep the prices stable as they instead skyrocketed.
For instance, the price of rice, which the minister specifically mentioned, jumped by 1.29 per cent as the average price of 1 kilogramme of imported high quality rice increased to N415.84 in June from N410.55 in May.
The data also showed that the average price of 1 kilogramme of tomato increased by 10.39 per cent to N375.00 in June from N339.72 in May.
Daily Trust’s fact check on a separate report also released by the NBS showed that the drop in inflation rate in June from 16.25 per cent recorded in May to 16.10 per cent was not as a result of fall in food prices as the food inflation rate remained high.
Further checks at the Selected Food Price Watch data for June 2017 showed that the average price of 1 kilogramme of yam tuber increased by 4.62 per cent in June to N292.06 from N279.15 recorded in May.
Analysis of the prices of foodstuffs between May and June 2017 showed that the price of 1 kilogramme of brown beans increased by 2.3 per cent, 1 kilogramme of white increased by 2.21 per cent and 1 kilogramme of 500g sliced bread increased by 4.19 per cent.
The prices of garri, a staple food in Nigeria, also skyrocketed by over 7 per cent with a kilogramme of yellow garri selling for N354.55 by the end of June, being 8.48 per cent higher than the price in May.
The data showed that other foodstuffs that had a hike in prices in June included beef, ofada rice, fish, onion and tinned milk.
A foodstuff trader, Ijeoma Onyeka, told Daily Trust that foodstuff prices have remained high, noting that she had not noticed any drop.
Onyeka, who owns a grocery outlet in Apo, said instead of going down, prices of foodstuff were on a constant rise.
“Nothing has gown down. Price is not reducing; in fact everything has been going up since last year,” she said.