The National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS) has appealed to the federal government to evolve a means of ending the continuous and arbitrary increase in food prices.
The students demanded that the federal government activate and invoke the stinging powers of the Consumer Protection Act to ensure that traders who are delighted at inflating prices of foodstuffs without any corresponding cause are brought to justice to serve as a deterrent to others.
These were contained in a statement issued yesterday and signed by the National Clerk of the Senate, NANS National, Comrade Yekinni Adewale, copies of which were made available to newsmen in Abeokuta, the Ogun State capital.
Adewale, in the statement, said this becomes exigent in view of the daily embarrassing ratio at which Nigerians have found it difficult to feed their families due to the unstable prices of commodities in the market, even before the advent of Eid-el-Kabir and to this day.
He expressed surprise that the price of conventional staple foods like a bag of rice, could as of today, cost the sum of over N80,000, with a bag of beans being sold at over N200,000, while traders nationwide could not offer any acceptable reason for such an astronomical increase.
Adewale appealed to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu not to hesitate to wielding the big hammer of the law of those marketers who are hell-bent on sabotaging the economic policies of his administration, stressing that if the trend continues, it could compel many to steal to feed their families even against their wishes.
“It has come to an embarrassing level, the rate at which these marketers are daily increasing prices of foodstuffs without any justification for such.
“The time is now for the federal, state and our Local Government functionaries to constitute a Special Task Force that will be visiting markets across all the local government areas and enforce the appropriate section of the Consumers Protection Act. This is because most marketers are hiding under the pretence that ‘things are cost now’ to hike the prices of foodstuffs daily.
“NANS wants the three tiers of government to properly understand that this act of economic sabotage may not end until governments institute a price control measure with stiffer sanction to serve as samples for others,” he said.
