Even more than petroleum, rice has for decades been the most discussed commodity in the Nigerian news media, and the most talked-about.  Wherever two three Nigerians are gathered, you can be sure that rice is on their minds; that they are comparing notes and exchanging intelligence on where rice of good quality can be obtained with dispatch and at an affordable price.

The evidence for this large claim is anecdotal, I grant.  But I have a hunch that a longitudinal content analysis of news and features in the print and electronic media, not forgetting the social media, will bear out my hypothesis.

There should be a surfeit of research support for such a study from the Federal Ministry of Agriculture, Central Bank of Nigeria and the African Development Bank, all of which have with uncommon commitment concentrated the nation’s mind and resources on the attainment of self-sufficiency in the production of the commodity in the near term and global ranking in the medium term as a major exporter.

The wonder they have wrought was on spectacular display in Abuja the other day.

Residents woke up one morning only to behold in the skyline a vast colony of pyramids stretching as far as they could see.  Rice pyramids.  Somewhat squat; nothing like the sleek, tarpaulin-draped pyramids that    rose unpretentiously from the railway shipyard at Kofar Nassarawa,  gravitated majestically toward the skies and could be seen from just about point in the metropolis.

Fifteen rice pyramids in Abuja by one count, configured from one million sacks of paddy rice trucked from fields across the country and painstakingly stacked one bag at a time to produce a visual delight and excite the appetite all at once.

As a schoolboy vacationing in Kano in the late fifties and sixties, I used to so spend my idle afternoons watching men carrying groundnut sacks on their backs or on their heads build a large rectangular base more than a storey high and covering an area larger than a soccer pitch, and then proceed therefrom to sculpt the iconic shape that has evoked wonder and mystery down the ages.

The aspect to which I looked forward the most was the placing of the last groundnut sack at the apex of the pyramid.  Much folklore and ritual surrounded the event.   It was said that only a few men were chosen for the task. The prize was a princely sum of one guinea, or one pound sterling and a shilling.  For comparison, a brand new Raleigh, Rudge or Hercules bicycle sold for about 17 pounds.

The reward for placing the last sack atop the pyramid also included a bolt of white linen that was for whoever performed the feat to employ as he chose on returning to base.  If he lost his footing and fell to his death, it would serve as his burial shroud.  That, any rate, was the lore.

Much to my disappointment, I never witnessed that final act.  Weeks before a scheduled consummation, it would be time to return to Zaria, and to school.

Behind the Abuja pyramids, however, there was no tradition of any kind. The situation allowed for none; hunger was ravaging the land. On the lips of folks in the bustling cities and townships and the hardscrabble, countryside, the insistent question is:  How soon can my family sit down to a meal of rice?

But a government committed to changing the national conversation and to inaugurating a paradigm of         food self-sufficiency must take the longer view.  It must memorialize for posterity the key moments in this paradigm shift, if only as an answer to those who would deny that there was ever such a breakthrough.

The construction of the rice pyramids Abuja marked such a moment.

The conversation on rice, it needs to be remembered, goes back to the time of President Shehu Shagari. The appetite for rice of the imported variety which Nigerians had developed in the oil-boom years continued to grow long after the boom had turned into gloom and long after that prodigal government had dissipated the nation’s massive foreign reserve.

Rice became, first, a scarce commodity, and then a hard currency in itself.   A smugglers’ market in the commodity flourished but most homes could not afford it.  Shagari responded by setting up a Presidential Task Force on the Importation of Rice, and named one of his most powerful cabinet ministers, Umaru Dikko, as chair and chief executive.

Dikko was warming up when the military struck.

The balance-of-payments problems of the Exchequer worsened, leading to tighter import controls even for basic necessities. Officially, rice importation was banned, but smugglers kept the traffic thriving through the port of Cotonou in neighbouring Benin Republic.

Military president Ibrahim Babangida’s structural adjust programme (SAP) further tightened import controls. But the regime’s attention shifted from rice to wheat, the importation of which they said was gulping an unwholesome chunk of the nation’s lean foreign reserves.  They branded wheat bread an acquired taste that had no place in Nigeria’s culinary history, and a degenerate one of that matter, sustained by an unpatriotic elite.

Degenerate or not, the taste had become so entrenched that it could no longer be curbed, much less stamped out.  So, the regime decided that the unpatriotic elite, aforementioned, could continue to have their bread so long as it was baked from locally-grown wheat.  That was how the National Accelerated Wheat Production Programme came into being, under which every parcel of land, from the desiccated Sahel to the mangrove swamps of the delta, claimed to be specially suited for growing wheat.

Federal funding was lavish, as was publicity.  Kano soon emerged as the epicentre of wheat production in Nigeria.  Wheat fields stretching as far as the eye could see featured daily in television news.  So promising were the early reports it was projected that Nigeria in another two or three years, would rival, if not supplant the United States, Canada, Argentina, Brazil and Australia in wheat production and exports.

Season after season, wheat growers in the North announced super-bumper harvests.  The only trouble was that millers could find no wheat to buy to put back on stream the plants that had lain idle since wheat imports were banned.  After the Kaduna State government announced the figures at the end of one season, the millers association offered to buy up the entire crop.

Their representative, the late and much distinguished public servant and administrator, Ahmed Joda, was told that it had already been sold.

Well before then, Babangida had stopped launching the wheat harvest.  He too had finally seen through the scam.  Since then, the national the accelerated wheat production programme rarely gets mentioned except as an emblem of a costly misadventure.  Babangida’s subsequent campaign to produce bread from cassava flour never got off the ground.

Nothing daunted, cassava bread came to be canvassed again as a patriotic, healthy local alternative wheat bread most strenuously by President Goodluck Jonathan, who claimed that no day passed without his having that delicacy and fish pepper-soup.  It was even rumoured at the time that they had in residence at Aso Rock, a cabinet-rank officer with the title of Senior Special Assistant on Cassava Bread and Allied Products to cater to Dr Jonathan’s special needs.

The project died well before Jonathan left office.  He may yet revive it if, or more likely when, as is widely being speculated, the people in their unwisdom recall him in 2023 to come and finish his presidential mandate that was so brusquely terminated seven years ago.

And so we are back to the on-going rice campaign.  In Nigeria, whenever they say that something has come to stay, you can be sure it is on the way out.  The rice campaign is different.  Something tells me it will endure.

But not in bags stacked in pyramids stacked in distant places.  It belongs in the warehouses and in the markets and the stores and the shops and the roadside kiosks and in the pantries and in pots and pans     steaming and sizzling on kitchen stoves.

It belongs ultimately in the dishes in which it will be served for the nurture of starving consumers.

Get it there fast, while the massive subsidies last.

In formal terms, Bashir Tofa was one of the principal figures in the June 12, 1993, presidential election debacle. As candidate and standard-bearer of the National Republican Convention (NRC), one of the two recognised official political parties, he shared the spotlight with the candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), Bashorun MKO Abiola.

Few outside Kano and the business community knew much about Tofa until he was catapulted to head the NRC ticket by the not-so-hidden hands of the grand manipulator in Aso Rock and his proxies, as an element in their secret agenda. The intelligence at the time was that military president, Ibrahim Babangida would seize on some gaps in Tofa’s résumé to void the election if, as per his calculation, Tofa won. And Tofa would not be in a position to cause a stir.

Secret agenda or no secret agenda, foil or no foil, Tofa grew quickly into the role of presidential candidate, crisscrossing the country in a spirited campaign. One element of that campaign clings in my memory. It was a television commercial in which a man decked out as an ordained priest  led an energetic crowd whose attires reflected the nation’s ethnic diversity in chanting “Tofa is the answer, Tofa.” Billboards dotting the landscape carried the same message.

Even more memorable was the televised debate between Tofa and Abiola, staged by the NTA and moderated by its senior programme executive, Dr Biodun Sotumbi. Oil pricing came up, naturally, in the wake of yet another threat to cut a phantom gasoline subsidy. Tofa, it turned out, did not even know the pump price of a gallon of petrol.

There was always something flighty about him. But his performance was on the whole passable. Among major commentators, only MCK Ajuluchukwu thought Tofa had “won” the debate.

For Nigerians weary of the bitterness and the stubborn refusal to accept defeat that had been prominent features of Nigerian politics, I suspect that the high point of the debate came at the very end. Abiola and Tofa shook hands and pledged to abide by the result of the election, no matter how it turned.

This, then, was going to be a different election. The political transition programme, despite its manifest flaws, might yet inaugurate a new political era.

It was not to be.

Abiola won outright in 18 states, including Tofa’s home state, Kano. He also won more than one-fourth of the votes cast in all but two or three of the remaining 14 states.

This was the most decisive victory in Nigeria’s history, in what local and foreign observers ranked among the cleanest they had witnessed anywhere and also, I fear, the fairest and freest my generation will ever know.

The National Electoral Commission had named a chief returning officer, a signal that it was           set to declare a winner.

In keeping with Tofa’s pledge, his camp had assembled to put the finishing touches to a statement conceding defeat when, according to Dr Doyin Okupe, NRC’s national publicity secretary, Tofa’s cell phone rang. Tofa responded in Hausa to the call, which he said was from “the Villa,” and then retreated to a private room where he and the caller continued their conversation, in Hausa.

Emerging some 30 minutes later, Tofa was a changed man, Okupe told me in an interview for my book, Diary of a Debacle.  Gone from his countenance was any trace of a willingness to concede, or even compromise. In its place, defiance, and grim determination.

The concession was never made. Instead, calls for voiding the poll, for reasons ranging from the infantile to the spurious, poured forth from the NRC camp.

Babangida gladly obliged.

Abiola’s camp, propelled by the umbrella organisation NADECO, mounted a campaign of protest and resistance that shook Nigeria to its fragile roots.

Tofa slunk into the obscurity from which he had been plucked. Never has a principal actor in an epic drama faded so quickly from the scene, unremarked and barely remembered.

Sometime in 1997, Tofa’s handlers inveigled or bribed some rogue elements in the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations into inviting him to address that prestigious bastion of America’s foreign policy establishment.

Compounding his fecklessness with mendacity, Tofa declared with a straight face that he, not Abiola, had won the election – a claim Tofa had never made at home — and that he had accepted the annulment in the national interest.

Year after year, as those who hold that governance should be based on the consent of the people rather than the caprice of a cabal celebrated the June 12 anniversary, Tofa kept denouncing the occasion.

He was at it again in 2013, on the 20th anniversary of the historic poll.

The brutal and thieving dictator, Sani Abacha, of frightful memory, had called the election a “watershed.” In a shameless and self-serving retreat with few parallels here or anywhere, the annuller himself, General Babangida, had called the election “the best” in Nigeria’s history and claimed the credit for organising it.

Fifteen years after the election, its chief umpire, Humphrey Nwosu, freed finally from the oath  of silence the annullers had sworn him to, published the official results.  Abiola had won, in the manner the election returns awaiting official certification had indicated.

As if to secure his place in the hall of infamy even as other authors and enablers of the annulment were seeking desperately to extricate themselves from that gallery, Tofa declared, on its 20th anniversary that “June 12” was dead, that its celebration “a fiction.”

“I am not one of those people that celebrate fiction that is the more reason why I don’t like to be talking again on June 12 presidential election,” he told journalists in Kano.

“Only those who don’t have anything to offer to this country to move forward can still be talking about June 12 presidential elections.

“If you have learnt any lesson out of it, well; if you have not, keep quiet, let this country make progress. But for one to still be talking about something that occurred 20 years ago, is colossal waste of time.”

This is the quality of mind of a man whom the manipulators of the transition program judged fit to be president, the man who had a statistical chance of being elected to that office but chose to connive in the annulment of the election.

Yet, when he died on January 3, aged 74, unless you belonged in the attentive audience, you would have been led to believe that Tofa was “a patriot to the core,” the quintessence of statesmanship, and a democrat of the deepest hue.

President Muhammadu Buhari eulogized him as “a true nationalist that would be difficult to replace” and for good measure dispatched a delegation to Kano with a message of condolence to            State Governor Abdullahi Ganduje.  Yobe State Governor Mai Mala Buni lamented that Tofa departed when Nigeria sorely needed his wise counsel.

And so on and so forth.

But their Tofa is the Tofa we never knew.

As I stated earlier, there was always more than a touch of flightiness to the Tofa persona.  That flightiness was on full display on June 12, 1993, as he traipsed from one voting booth to another in his Kano constituency in vain hope of casting his ballot. His name was not on any of the books.

Apparently, the man who would be President had not even bothered to register to vote.

History will remember him all right, but mainly as a contemptible footnote to “June 12.”