What do the poor really eat?
Yemi Ajayi
On my way from the office, I was trapped in traffic, which stretched from Oworosonki to Ikeja Cantonment. Traffic on Ikorodu Road was moving as fast as a snail.
Over 90 minutes after leaving the office, I was still far from home. With the crawling traffic goes my hope of getting home on time to beat my dinner deadline of 7pm.
If I wasn’t not going to go to bed with just the breakfast I had at 7am, and thereby invited a protest by my innards that might be worse than the #endsars convulsions, then finding something to eat before getting home would be the best thing to do.
Then the gods intervened. They sent an angel in the form of a woman whose aroma of her wares wafted towards me even before I got to her spot. And behold her wares of roasted plantain (boli) and groundnuts, my favourite snacks as far back as the mid 60s. My cravings for the combo of roasted plantain and groundnuts is like that of Buharists and good news. And I’ve a big scar(how I got it is a story for another day) on my body as a memento of my undying love for the combo.
However, my relief of at last finding something to eat was dampened by the fact that I had to fork out N500 for the combo in the picture below.
As I munched it, I wondered how the poor now survive if one has to splurge N500 on just boli and groundnuts. Before Buhari happened to Nigeria, less of that amount would get anyone a good meal of amala, gbegiri and ewedu, with a big chunk of goat meat to boot.
That amount is also enough to cook a pot of soup and buy a measure of gari to make a whole meal. But if N500 is now barely enough for snacks (yes, not enough because I didn’t include the price of water), how do the poor feed? What do they really eat as prices of foodstuff are reaching for the skies? Not even the N10k being distributed by “incoming president” can feed just 1 person for a month, much less a family or lifting anyone out of poverty.
O God, we lift our eyes to the hill.
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Ajayi, a Lagos-based media executive, first published the article on his Facebook page
