By Bisola Adeyemo and Nneka Nwogwugwu
Nigerian bread and confectionery manufacturers under the auspices of the Association of Masters Bakers and Caterers have insisted that there will be a 30% increase in the price of bread nationwide.
The Association’s National President had last month announced the approval of a 30% increase in bread price.
In an interview with NatureNews on Saturday, June 5, the FCT chairman of the Association, Ishaq Abdulraheem, blamed flour Millers for being a major factor causing the increase.
He said, “The flour Millers are putting pressure on human beings unnecessarily. Today, the flour price have increased with 2000 naira. You can see that the 30% may not be feasible because not only flour price is increasing, sugar, butter has also increased, in fact everything we are using for production have increased.”
Calling on the government to intervene, he said, “the government need to look into their area of operations because it seems they want to siphon money from Nigeria and keep in their country while we are living in poverty. What they are doing is clearly a sabotage to the economy.
“A lot of bakeries are not working and foe some functioning ones, staff are being laid off. The Government need to look into the activities of flour Millers and sugar producers because it seems they want to make profit and put the country into chaos.”
Explaining reasons for the Association’s decision, Abdulraheem said, “The increment of price is being proposed by our national body. This as a result of all the increase of price in all the commodities we are using to produce bread and confectioneries.
“If we increase it to 30%, is still won’t yield anything to us because the distributors are adding price anyhow, knowing that we don’t have any option.
“Everything we use for production has increased even diesel we use in running operations.”
The FCT chairman while explaining reasons the distributors also chose to increase their prices said, “The distributors blame the dollar for their increase in price, they will tell you that Federal government has removed subsidy for them so they are now buying dollar from black market.
“When the FG said that they are withdrawing dollar subsidy the distributors immediately increased the price.”
Speaking on the level of compliance in effecting the 30% increase for bakers in the FCT, he said, “ The FCT bakers have not started implementing the 30% directive. We are still thinking of how we are going to implement it and how to advise our members on it. It was the National body that announced the increase, we are only going to implement it at the state level.”
Abdulraheem further appealed to the Federal government to look into the situation so as to help bakers have dividends of Tehran labour.
NatureNews correspondent who also spoke to owners of some bakeries in the FCT gathered that some of them have decided to embark on a strike over the increment in flour, wheat and sugar.
Speaking to NatureNews on Friday, Mrs peace Izeduwa, nexta bakery manager lamented “ This has affected our cost of production directly, before, flour was sold for 10,00p naira but now it has increased to 15 thousand and we’ve heard that it will still get to 20,000 naira very soon.
“Every week, there’s an increment of about five hundred or seven hundred on most of our equipment in the market, as of yesterday a thousand naira was added to sugar, who knows the additional amount tomorrow?
“Everything keeps increasing in the market but the income of workers remain unchanged.
“Though we are still selling at old prices because of the poor masses, and if we increase our prices it will affect the final consumers but this is not really good for our business, that is why we are planning to go on strike if the federal government careless of finding a solution to it,” she said.
In the same vain, Udoma Terry, manager of Snacky London bread in Kubwa central market said “we just want the federal government to help us look into this matter, because it has drastically affected our production.
“The number of bags of flour we were using before cannot be used again, we, therefore, appeal to the federal government to look into the matter.”
While interacting with bread sellers Musa Ibrahim stated that, “Our manufacturers haven’t increased the amount of bread, we are still buying the same price.
Another seller, Miss rose obi said “I pray the price doesn’t increase because it will be difficult to be buying the same amount as before which is going to affect my children school fees and feeding.”
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