Nigeria leader concerned over 'spiraling food prices'

By Felix Tih

ANKARA (AA) - The Nigerian president on Thursday said he is concerned about "spiraling food prices" in the country at a time when the economy is already in a slowdown due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Muhammadu Buhari, in a series of tweets, said his government is "very mindful of the challenge of high food prices," and is doing everything it can to bring them down.

"To ease the current high cost of poultry production, I have approved the release of 30,000 tons of maize from the national reserves, to animal feed producers," he said.

He claimed that the "exploitative behaviour by middlemen and other actors" was behind the food price hike.

"We are also engaging with food producers associations and groups to tackle the issue," the president said.

Bashir Ahmad, the president's assistant on New Media, also argued that the crisis was because of "unscrupulous middlemen who insert themselves between farmers and consumers, and systematically create artificial scarcity so they can sell at higher prices."

The West African country's economy has been hit hard by the effects of the virus outbreak, as well as low oil prices.

Several African countries, including Nigeria, have eased lockdown restrictions in a bid to revive the economy.

With a population of nearly 200 million, Nigeria, one of Africa's largest economies, has registered 54,463 virus infections, including and 1,027 deaths with 42,439 recoveries to date, according to the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control.

In June, Buhari said the government will create more than 700,000 jobs to reduce the virus fallout on the youth.