Some women who are local bread (Gurasa) bakers, on Friday, staged a peaceful protest in Kano to express their displeasure over high cost of flour, saying the constant price hike is causing a serious financial hardship on their business.

Gurasa is a local bread in the northern part of Nigeria produced with flour yeast, sugar and water. This job is mostly done by women and sold at many markets and motorparks.

The protesters who throng the popular Yankasuma streets in ancient city of Kano, carried placards with inscriptions written in Hausa languages but translated into English language as; “we condemned the high price of flour ”

Others read: “This is where we get our daily bread, we will stop the production”, “Gurasa is mostly staple food in the north”, “Federal government, assist us,we are dying because of the high prices of flour.”

According to the protesters, life is becoming more difficult, “we can hardly feed or send our children to school due to this hardship”

Addressing the press on behalf of the protesters who were mostly women, Hajiya Fatimah Anwar said, “We are out here on the streets protesting to let the leaders know the deteriorating situation in which we are at the moment.

“This is our small scale-business facing deterioration due to rise in the price of flour, it is a business for the poor that the rich cannot dare venture into.

“We are in a very difficult situation, we need help. This is a small-scale industry mostly run by women.

“Many have lost their capital. It is such that only 25 percent of us are now remaining in the business as many others have closed down due to lack of capital.”

Speaking further, she lamented how a bag of flour which was sold at N16,000 before is now N43,000 in the market.

“We used to buy a bag of floor at the rate of N16,000 in the past but now it sells for N43,000. This is absurd. What we produce is a common food for the poor and is now becoming unaffordable. Anytime we go to buy flour, we get an increase of N1,500 to N2,000′

“We are calling on the authorities and those concerned to look into this matter because we are running out of business and is affecting our families.

“Currently, we use the IRS flour produced by Abdussamad, it is the best for our products but we cannot afford it any longer. If nothing is done, we have no choice but to close down and this will affect the general public.”

She therefore added that, “We cannot engage in an act that is not in tandem with the religion of Islam, hence the need for various governments especially, to wade into this high price of flour by engaging those companies producing flour on the need to bring the price down.”

Hajiya Fatimah Anwar also called on government to find a positive ways to assist those Flour companies to source for foreign exchange, so that the cost of production would be favourable to them. (Nigerian Tribune)

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