Nigerians are known to have a unmatched love for rice and can go any length to have it ready during celebrations. Simbo Olorunfemi, in this hilarious piece writes on the matter.
What is it really with Nigerians and rice? You can do every other thing to the Nigerian, even pad the budget, he won’t mind, but once the matter has to do with his rice, trust him to definitely speak up, as that is one place where the shoe pinches, for many.
For some who look back to the pre-PMB days with some form of fondness, it is all about the price of rice. It is an easy comparison, for them, of how much a bag of rice sold for, then and now. All that talk about crash in oil price, devaluation of the naira, looting of the commonwealth and the impact our depleted reserves have on the price of imported items is too elevated and plenty talk, without substance, when it has to do with rice. Just give them rice, as it was done in Ekiti, and will be well. Some will gladly ask for corruption to be brought back as long as there is rice from Thailand to eat. Some lose every bit of common sense, once there is rice and ponmo in abundance.
We are told rice, not necessarily in the form we now know it, has been cultivated in West Africa for at least 3000 years. Good. You would think that will make us some sort of experts in its cultivation by now. We are experts in its consumption, instead. We can tell rice cooked with firewood apart from that with the stove. We can tell the one wrapped in local leaves apart from the one ensconced in warmers. We are authorities on the varieties, at the consumption point. So is our love affair with rice. Yet, I doubt that this affinity of 3000 years has anything to do with it. Just as our appetite for Champagne and other toys of luxury has little or nothing to do with how long they have been with us, so is the case or craze for rice.
I have long suspected, though, that there is more to this love affair between Nigerians and rice than meets the ordinary eye. For it is really difficult to explain this thing for rice, especially the party jollof. There is a whole library of jokes and anecdotes about the jollof rice. For some, the owambe fever is even less about who is doing what or not but simply about the party jollof. That is how seriously we take this matter. Our obsession with the grain has almost become idolatry. Rice has become a source of national pride that we are in a permanent state of war with other nations, especially immediate neighbours – Ghana and Senegal – on who has the copyright to jollof rice. Bragging rights over whose Jollof rice is better remains unresolved. As my people will say, this thing about rice ‘ki s’oju lasan.’ It just cannot be. How do you explain Africans competing among themselves over what they consume rather than what they produce?
You can take the Nigerian out of Nigeria but you can hardly take that love for rice out of him. On our trips abroad, until we discover that place where we can find rice to eat, we are never at ease. We are all over the place, fretting and searching for rice, like Mungo Park, in his bid to ‘discover’ River Niger. It is often a crisis until we are able to get our fix of rice. Perhaps, it needs a bit of more effort to confirm it, but I won’t be surprised if we yet find out that there is something addictive in the rice that is shipped to Nigeria. Only that might be able to explain it, as nothing has been the same with us, since politicians discovered the wonders that a bag of rice can bring their way.
As it is, the question of being able to do without rice does not even arise. Official figures, at a point, estimated that we consumed one billion naira worth of imported rice every day. And that is only the official data, not taking into account the sizeable bulk that comes in through our porous borders, especially from Benin Republic. CBN estimates have it that Nigeria spent N800 billion importing rice in 2014. Between the trillions of naira spent importing rice, petrol, champagne, water, toothpicks and other ‘essential waste’, we ate tomorrow yesterday and we are having to pick the bill today, yet our people still want to eat imported rice.
Some argue that rice is staple food. It is difficult to contest that, but the question is: How did imported rice become staple food in Nigeria? How did we get to the point where we became obsessed with consuming what we do not produce in sufficient quantity? The good thing is that circumstances have finally forced upon us a hard reset in thinking into realising that if we must eat rice, it had better be produced locally. With our backs to the wall and our plates virtually empty, it is good to see that some of our people are beginning to respond more effectively to this challenge. At the last count, I must have seen about 10 different brands of locally packaged rice advertised online this week, with the ubiquitous Dangote reportedly set to make an entry into the market soon.
Back in the day, our mothers were quick to tell us that it is what we have in the house that we would eat, and not what we wish we had. That is as it should be. We cannot continue to eat our tomorrow with both hands, enriching other countries and lining the pockets of those who import rice that have been in silos for several years and expect things to go well. If Nigerians must eat rice, then we must find a way to produce it and distribute it more efficiently locally. Putting a stop to rice imports in the next few years, as being touted, is the way to go. It is glad to see Nigerians eagerly stepping up to embrace locally produced rice. Party jollof might even taste better with the locally produced rice if we try it out. What is it with rice, anyway?
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