Nigeria has been hit by a wave of violent unrest over food as its economic and security crisis deepens, raising fears of widespread hunger and a breakdown in law and order in Africa’s most populous nation.
Assaults on grain warehouses have been reported across the country in recent weeks after the cost of living reached levels not seen since the mid-1990s and the food inflation rate jumped above 35 per cent at the start of the year.
The government has been forced to deploy security forces to warehouses in Abuja after an incident on the outskirts of the capital this month, in which an angry crowd descended on a storage facility in the city and emptied it of grain, badly damaging the building in the process. The looting continued for more than two hours before police restored order.