A bag of rice costs N67,500 in the Northeast. In the South-South, it is N56,000. In Lagos, depending on which market you visit, it ranges somewhere between N61,000 and N75,000. These are not small differences. They are the difference between a family eating three times a week or two times. They are the difference between a child going to school with lunch or without.
Yet the fact that we now need a geopolitical breakdown of rice prices to understand what Nigerians are actually paying tells you everything about the state of our food system. We have moved past the point where a national price makes sense. The country has fractured into food zones, each experiencing its own inflation crisis, each buying the same commodity at wildly different rates based on geography, insecurity, and broken supply chains.
This is not a natural market variation. In a functioning economy with reasonable infrastructure, a bag of rice should cost roughly the same whether you buy it in Kano or Calabar, adjusted only for transportation. That a bag costs 20 percent more in one region than another reveals deliberate failure at multiple levels: the government's inability to secure the roads that move goods; the monopolies that control distribution; the farming policies that have made Nigeria dependent on imports for a staple it should grow in abundance.
The Northeast's higher price is the most damning. This is a region under siege. Boko Haram has made farming in many areas impossible. Communities cannot move goods safely to markets. Traders price in the risk of losing inventory to theft or attack. Yes, this is partly about insecurity that the government cannot control overnight. But it is also about a government that has not invested seriously in alternative supply routes, storage facilities, or support for local production in safer areas. The Northeast should be importing rice from other regions at a manageable premium, not paying prices that suggest siege economics.
The South-South's relatively lower price is instructive in a different way. This region has port access and proximity to trading routes. It can import directly. It has options that landlocked regions do not. But this advantage should not exist. If the federal government had invested in stabilizing internal supply chains over the past decade, if the Central Bank's rice importation policies made sense, if we had trade routes that worked, then geography should matter far less than it does.
Someone defending the status quo would argue that regional price variation is inevitable and that complaining about it ignores the broader economic picture. They might point out that Nigerians are buying rice at all, that supply lines are functioning, that worse could happen. They might say that expecting uniform pricing across a country Nigeria's size is naive.
This argument misses the point entirely. The question is not whether variation should exist. The question is whether the size of the variation reflects real scarcity or reflects policy failure. A 20 percent spread suggests the latter. It suggests that somewhere between the farmer and the consumer, the system is leaking value and creating artificial scarcity. It suggests that people in different regions are not really buying the same commodity at different prices. They are buying different commodities, because the Northeast version carries the cost of insecurity and broken logistics, while the South-South version does not.
What strikes me most is that we have become comfortable with data that should horrify us. A price map showing regional fragmentation used to be something an economist would identify as a problem requiring urgent intervention. Now it is simply reported as information, as though documenting the fracture is the same as accepting it. The headline does its job. Readers learn what they will pay. The system continues unchanged.
Here is what needs to happen. The Central Bank should stop treating rice as an import policy problem and start treating it as a logistics problem. We import rice because we have not built reliable domestic supply chains, not because we cannot grow it. The solution is not tariffs or import restrictions that create black markets and higher prices for poor people. The solution is roads that work, storage that does not lose product to decay, and support for farmers in regions where production is possible.
Second, the government needs to acknowledge that the Northeast premium reflects security failure, not market reality. That region cannot normalize while goods cost 20 percent more than elsewhere. There should be a deliberate program to stabilize supply lines from safer farming regions, subsidizing transport if necessary, making sure the cost of insecurity does not collapse what remains of the local economy.
Third, regulatory agencies need to investigate whether the variation reflects genuine supply constraints or coordinated price-fixing by distributors. When prices vary this widely across regions, someone is usually extracting profit from the gap.
If none of this happens, the regional price map will widen. We will see the Northeast climb further as insecurity deepens. We will see Lagos become a premium market as rural migration intensifies. We will see the country sort itself into food haves and food have-nots based on geography. That is not inevitable. But it is what we are choosing if we treat rice price fragmentation as data to report rather than a problem to solve.
OduViews represents the editorial opinion of OduNews.
