By Ishola Adeleke, YeyeNews.com, October 9, 2021
The Association of Middlemen in Nigeria (AMIN) has frowned at the usual penchant of President Muhammadu Buhari to blame its members for the unrelenting rise in food prices across the country. The association made their angst known in a statement sent to YeyeNews.com.
“For far too long, we have tolerated this evasive tactic by President Buhari and some of his appointees to blame members of AMIN for the unabating hike in food prices across Nigeria” the statement reads. “We have been seeing the tendency to blame others as a hallmark of this administration and we thought ignoring them will be in the best interest for all. But we are now forced to resist this blatant scapegoating of our innocent members as the president, during his Independence Day broadcast, once again blamed us for hording agricultural products. This government must take responsibility for its failures and stop the blame game. They have exhausted all their blaming capital extracted from past administrations and now they have decided to focus on AMIN. We are no longer going to accept that.”
The statement, signed by the group’s chairman Mallam Goma Abdul and secretary Chigbo Aloma, further reminded President Buhari that members of AMIN had been doing business in the Nigeria food market for decades and questioned why it is in his “government that we now began to horde food to drive up prices? It doesn’t make any sense.”
Some Nigerians who spoke to YeyeNews,com about the matter expressed surprise that AMIN is responding to accusations by the president. “Why are they wasting their time responding to these people?” a schoolteacher in Abeokuta told YeyeNews.com reporter. “Nobody takes such blaming serious anymore. Initially it was PDP that was the cause of every problem and now it is the middlemen. Next, they will blame the farmers or the consumers for buying more than what they need. They will eventually blame everybody except themselves who are the real definition of incompetence,” she concluded.
A stalwart of the PDP told YeyeNews.com reporters that the party leadership felt relieved that the president didn’t blame their party in his Independence Day speech. “He has made it a habit to blame us for all the failures of his administration. He even blamed us for his wife’s relocation to Dubai. That’s how ridiculous this has become. So, this time that he has chosen to put his blame on the middlemen, we are very relieved because we won’t have to waste our ink responding to allegations that are not worth a dot of our ink in the first place.”
