Headline

Starvation Looms As Baking Industry Moves To Shut Down Over High Cost Of Production

Published

4 years ago

October 9, 2021

Baking industry producing bread, a major staple food in Nigeria is currently shutting down operation in some parts of the country following the high cost of essential ingredients including flour, sugar and other items.

DAILY POST observed that some bakeries in the Federal Capital Territory had already shut down since May 2021 and resorted to other businesses following constant surge in bags of flour and sugar.

Price of bread in some parts of the country had previously witnessed increments despite decrease in quality and quantity by bakers who complained of running at losses due to the surge in materials.

Our correspondent gathered that a loaf hitherto sold at N400 is currently been marketed between N600 and N700, worsening the hardship imposed on Nigerians following the economic and security crisis bedeviling the entire nation at the moment.

DAILY POST’s finding also reveals that a bag of flour which was sold between N11,000 to N12,000 in January this year, has skyrocketed to N23,000 and above triggering the decision of the bakers to suspend operations pending when normalcy returns.

Similarly, a bag of sugar which was sold at the rate of N13,000 in late 2020 is currently sold for N25,000 and above in many parts of the country.

Speaking with DAILY POST, Chief Executive Officer of a popular bakery in Delta State, Mandela Makinde said he has shut down his company till further notice, stressing that he had been running at a loss for the past seven months.

According to him, the price of flour increases on a weekly basis, stressing that he lost over N300,000 in September while trying to keep the business afloat.

He hinted on alleged moves by some bakery owners in the state to resort to substandard way of producing breads by using harmful ingredients in a bid to continue the business.

According to him, “We have basically ran at a loss for the past 7 months, been keeping it open with personal funds just so my workers would have a job while I thought there would be change, but at this moment we have no other choice than to shut down.

“I am currently at the bakery and nothing is going on. We have suspended all activities here pending when the price of flour reduces.

“The price of flour and other ingredients have consistently continued to rise since the beginning of this year. As a CEO, I don’t have a single flour now because the last time I went to the market, the price they gave me was too high and I couldn’t afford it.”

Asked if there is a plan to further increase the price of bread, he said “it is an individual business, so you cannot actually fix the price of bread because it is a competitive market. If your price is higher than every other person’s own, customers will go for the cheaper ones.”

Speaking on reasons for the constant increments, the CEO said “since wheat importers started to source their Fx from the black market, the price of flour has continued to rise”.

He called on the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) to investigate some bakeries, alleging that some of them use ‘Bromate and Sacarine’, products considered to be harmful to health.

“Many have played with volume in order to keep the price steady, some are beginning to add dangerous items such as ‘Bromate and Sacarine’ to keep their prices low”.

Similarly, Mr Adebayo Ayomide, a bakery owner in Bwari Area Council, FTC Abuja told DAILY POST that he has converted the bakery to a mini poultry due to the constant surge in price of flour.

He said, “Before I shut down the bakery recently, I was already indebted. What I usually do was to go to the market and get the flour from the seller then pay him after selling the bread but unfortunately, I was no longer making even the capital not to talk of profit. I had to stop and look for alternative.

“The country is so hard right now that relatively, nothing is working. Even this poultry, the chicken feed is very expensive and that is why you see that the price of egg is always increasing”.

Speaking with DAILY POST in Abuja, a bread consumer, Miss Jennifer lamented the level of hardship currently bedeviling the masses saying no food is presently affordable to the poor.

“Gone are the days when some food items like garri, bread were seen as poor man’s food. Now, both the rich and the poor are struggling for the items.

“The money is not there, common bread that you can just eat with soft drinks to quench hunger is no longer there, garri is not affordable, rice is never a poor man’s food so what do we do?

“The moment you begin to think that things will get better, you will just hear something worse. How did we get here? And the major problem in this country is that nothing goes up and comes down.”

DAILY POST reports that the development may worsen the economy as many employees of the bakeries shutting down across the country would be pushed to the streets as jobless people.

Headline

UK Police Hunt Asylum Seeker Mistakenly Freed For Sex Offence

Published

9 hours ago

October 25, 2025

Editor

UK police were still hunting Saturday for an Ethiopian asylum seeker and convicted sex offender whose crimes sparked a wave of anti-immigration protests and who was accidentally released from prison.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer said he was “appalled” by Friday’s “totally unacceptable” error that saw 38-year-old Hadush Gerberslasie Kebatu freed rather than sent to an immigration detention centre.

“This man must be caught and deported for his crimes,” the UK leader added.

Kebatu had served the first month of a one-year sentence for sexually assaulting a teenage girl and a woman, but was reportedly due to be deported when the Prison Service mistake occurred.

Kebatu’s high-profile case earlier this year in Epping, northeast of London, sparked demonstrations in various English towns and cities where asylum seekers were believed to be housed, as well as counter-protests.

Justice Secretary David Lammy said late Friday night that Kebatu was “at large in London” after he was seen boarding a train to the capital in Chelmsford, eastern England.

Essex Police, which is leading the search with the help of London’s Metropolitan Police, said Saturday that “inquiries are continuing at pace this morning to locate and arrest” him.

“Officers worked throughout the night to track his movements, including scouring hours of CCTV footage,” the force added, noting “it is not lost on us that this situation is concerning to people”.

The Telegraph reported he was wrongly categorised as a prisoner due to be released on licence and handed a £76 ($101) discharge grant.

The father of Kebatu’s anonymous teenage victim told Sky News that “the justice system has let us down”.

Police arrested the asylum seeker in July after he repeatedly tried to kiss a 14-year-old girl and touch her legs, and made sexually explicit comments to her.

He also sexually assaulted an adult woman, placing a hand on her thigh, when she intervened to stop his interactions with the girl.

At the time, Kebatu was staying at Epping’s Bell Hotel, where scores of other asylum seekers have been accommodated, and which became the target of repeated protests.

Headline

UK Is A Home, Not Hotel, Kemi Badenoch Tells Immigrants, Starmer’s Govt

Published

2 days ago

October 23, 2025

Editor

UK Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch has slammed Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour government over its immigration policy, declaring that Britain is “a home, not a hotel.”

Badenoch accused Labour of weakening the country’s borders and enabling mass automatic citizenship.

In a 1:11-minute video posted on her official X account on Friday, Badenoch claimed Labour’s proposed reforms could allow up to two million immigrants to automatically qualify for British citizenship starting next year.

“From next year, two million immigrants can automatically claim British citizenship. Two million people! That’s nearly twice the population of Birmingham. That’s massive,” Badenoch said in the video.

Badenoch noted that the Conservative Party has introduced a deportation bill to bring immigration down.

NDLEA intercepts drugs hidden in snails, others meant for UK, US, DRC
Among the measures she endorsed in the video were deporting all foreign criminals, mandatory age checks, no more pretending to be kids, tougher visa rules and salary thresholds, disapplying the Human Rights Act to immigration cases, and no more abusing human rights laws to judge deportations. Make asylum support repayable, and no permanent right to stay in the UK if you’ve relied on benefits.

“Until that’s law, we won’t fix this. Labour should adopt it now. It’s time to get tough. That’s what the Conservatives’ Deportation Bill delivers, and we’re going to go further. Our country is a home, not a hotel. And if we don’t defend it, no one else will.”

In the caption that came with the video, she tweeted, “Labour has blocked every single measure we’ve put forward to cut immigration and stop abuse of the system.

“Now they’re pushing one half-arsed proposal — it’s weak; it won’t work. It’s time they stopped playing games and backed our Deportation Bill.”

Headline

King Charles To Pray With Pope Leo In Historic Vatican Visit

Published

3 days ago

October 23, 2025

Editor

King Charles III will on Thursday meet Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican and make history as the first head of the Church of England to pray publicly with the pontiff for five centuries.

The 76-year-old monarch, who is the supreme governor of the Church of England, arrived in Rome on Wednesday evening with his wife, Queen Camilla, for what Buckingham Palace described as a “historic” state visit.

It will be Charles’s first meeting with Leo since the US-born pope took over as head of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics in May, following the death of Pope Francis.

The royals will arrive at the Apostolic Palace at 10.45am (0845 GMT) for private talks with the pope.

The king and queen will then join an ecumenical service at midday (1000 GMT) in the Sistine Chapel led by Pope Leo and the archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, currently the senior cleric of the Church of England.

Broadcast live by Vatican media, it will be the first time a reigning English or British monarch has prayed publicly with a pope since English king Henry VIII broke with Rome in 1534.

Triggered by the pope’s refusal to annul the king’s marriage so he could marry another woman, the schism made the monarch head of the separate Church of England.

Thursday’s service, held beneath Michelangelo’s spectacular ceiling frescoes, will be centred on conservation and protecting the environment, a cause championed by Charles.

It will bring together Catholic and Anglican traditions, with the choir from the Sistine Chapel joined by that from Saint George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, one of the king’s residences.

– Schism –

The religious break between London and Rome remains, even if there has been a significant rapprochement in recent decades.

In 1961, the late Queen Elizabeth II, Charles’s mother, became the first British monarch to visit the Holy See since the split.

The law was changed in 2013 so that marrying a Catholic would no longer disqualify someone from becoming monarch — although they still have to be a Protestant themselves.

The rapprochement is important because “Anglicanism was born in reaction to the Catholic Church, and therefore in opposition,” said Hyacinthe Destivelle, a French priest and member of the Vatican’s dicastery (department) for promoting Christian unity.

This is no longer the case, despite “theological differences in recent decades”, he told AFP.

Unlike the Roman Catholic Church, the Church of England — the mother church of the world’s 85-million-strong Anglican community — ordains women and allows priests to marry.

Sarah Mullally was recently named the first female archbishop of Canterbury, the Church’s top cleric, although she has yet to officially take up her post.

– Royal Confrater –

Charles and Queen Camilla are also set to take part in a service at the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls in Rome, one of four major papal basilicas, which has historic links with the English crown.

The king will be made a “Royal Confrater” of the basilica and presented with a specially designed seat for use by him and future British monarchs.

Charles has visited the Vatican several times and met privately with Pope Francis on April 9, just days before the pontiff’s death.

The king sent his son and heir, William, to the funeral and his brother, Prince Edward, the Duke of Edinburgh, to Leo’s inauguration mass.

The visit comes as the Catholic Church celebrates the Jubilee, a year-long event held every 25 years, which has drawn millions of pilgrims to the Vatican.

It also comes at a delicate time for Charles, following new revelations about his brother Prince Andrew, who is mired in a scandal surrounding late US sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Andrew announced on Friday that he would relinquish his title as Duke of York, reportedly under pressure from Charles. He had already stepped back from royal duties in 2019.

AFP