34.7 Million Nigerians Are In Food Crisis. Nobody Is Campaigning On It.
An estimated 34.7 million people were projected to face Crisis-level food insecurity or worse during the June to August lean season. It has barely featured in the opening of the campaign.
There is a number sitting underneath this campaign that is larger than almost anything being argued about on the platforms. During the June to August 2026 lean season, an estimated 34.7 million people in Nigeria were projected to experience Crisis-level food insecurity or worse.
That is IPC Phase 3 and above, the classification humanitarian agencies use to describe households that cannot meet minimum food needs without depleting essential assets. It is not famine. It is the stage before the stages that make international news.
Why it is not a campaign issue
Because the people it affects most are the people least able to make it one.
Food insecurity at this scale concentrates in the north-east and north-west, in conflict-affected and displaced populations, in rural areas with damaged market access. These are constituencies with low media leverage, limited organised representation and, in the worst-affected areas, compromised ability to vote at all. A grievance held by displaced households in Borno generates less political pressure than a fuel price felt by commuters in Lagos, even though it is a far more severe form of harm.
This is a recurring failure of electoral politics everywhere, but the gap in Nigeria is unusually wide.
How it connects to everything else
It is not a separate issue from the ones being debated. It is downstream of them.
Attention in a campaign follows leverage, and leverage follows organisation and media access.
Insecurity displaces farmers and takes land out of production. Currency devaluation raises the cost of imported inputs and of any food that is imported. Fuel costs raise the price of moving crops from where they are grown to where they are eaten, which in a country of Nigeria's size is a substantial share of the final price. Each of the reforms being argued over on the campaign trail has a food-security consequence, and almost none of the argument is being conducted in those terms.
What would count as a serious answer
Not a distribution programme announced in November. Something structural: security guarantees that let farmers plant, storage and transport investment that reduces post-harvest loss, and input support that is not priced in dollars.
None of that fits on a banner, which is roughly the point. The issues most likely to determine whether millions of Nigerians eat next year are the issues least likely to win an argument on television between now and January.
Why the number is so large
Food insecurity at this scale is not a harvest problem. It is the compound result of several separate failures arriving together.
Insecurity in the north-west and north-east has taken farmland out of production and displaced the households that worked it. Currency devaluation raised the cost of every imported input, from fertiliser to fuel for irrigation pumps. Higher transport costs raised the price of moving crops from where they are grown to where they are eaten, which in a country of Nigeria's size is a substantial share of the final shelf price.
Each of those is a policy area being argued about on the campaign trail. Almost none of the argument is being conducted in terms of what it does to the price of a meal in Sokoto.
What a serious answer would involve
Not a distribution programme announced in November, which is what the electoral calendar incentivises.
A structural answer involves security guarantees that allow farmers to plant and harvest without paying levies to armed groups; investment in storage and transport to reduce post-harvest loss, which in Nigeria runs at a level that would be considered a crisis in most economies; and input support that is not priced in dollars.
None of that fits on a banner or produces a photograph, which is precisely why it is unlikely to feature.
Sources: ACAPS; Human Rights Watch World Report 2026; Africa Defense Forum.
We will spend the next five months hearing about the pump price. We will hear comparatively little about 34.7 million people in food crisis, and the reason is not that anybody thinks fuel matters more.
It is that attention in a campaign follows leverage, and leverage follows organisation and media access. A commuter in Ikeja can make noise. A displaced household in Borno cannot, and in some cases cannot vote.
So the political system is structurally biased towards the loudest survivable problem rather than the quietest severe one. That is not a Nigerian pathology; it is what electoral politics does everywhere. But the gap here is unusually wide, and the consequences are unusually physical.
One useful discipline for readers over the next five months: every time a candidate makes an economic promise, ask what it does to the price of food in a northern rural market. If nobody on the platform can answer that, they are not running an economic policy. They are running a slogan.
