Maiduguri: Despite dwindling fish, Baga’s market thrives
Baga Dry Fish Market, located inside the Baga Road Motor Park in Maiduguri, is a Mecca of sorts. A great number of people throng the place daily from different parts of the country. The fish market, according to the merchants, has existed for 32 years now. The place is always a beehive of activities as […]
Baga Dry Fish Market, located inside the Baga Road Motor Park in Maiduguri, is a Mecca of sorts. A great number of people throng the place daily from different parts of the country. The fish market, according to the merchants, has existed for 32 years now. The place is always a beehive of activities as traders engage in buying dry fish and loading trailers to other parts of the country. Weekly Trust gathered that traders patronise the market mostly from Kaduna, Lagos, Aba, Onisha, Abakalliki, Kano, Abuja and other parts of the country daily to buy the dry fish.
According to the Secretary of the Fish Producers/ Marketers Association in Maiduguri, Alhaji Ahmadu Naa’I, trailers load fish to other parts of the country three times in a week. He said over 50 trailers load to other parts of the country every week. “ Before now, more than 100 trailers load fish weekly to other parts of the country but now, it is not so because of scarcity,” he added. The fish, he said, are mostly brought from Chad, Cameroon, Niger and some from the Lake Chad part of Nigeria.
When our reporter visited the market recently some of the traders spoke about the fish business. Emeka Nwaogbo, one of the traders, said he comes from Aba to the market every week. He said, “I have been coming here to buy fish in the last 20 years because the demand in my place is high but the problem we are having now is short supply. I do not normally get up to the supply I want because of scarcity of the fish. The market is not as it used to be. Before, if you come to this place, you get more than what you want, but now they say the water in the lake Chad where they get the fish from is drying which make the price to be going up every time.”
Another trader, Modu Bakura, said he has been in the business in the past 25 years but lamented that it is not booming as it used to be. “Prices of dry fish are now soaring and people from other parts of the country who come to us to buy fish do not come as they used to before and now there is scarcity of fish but before now, it was abundant,” he explained.
In the market, there are different categories of people engaging in the trade. Some of the traders are big time fish merchants who sell in bundles. Traders from other parts of the country buy from these people, while some of them sell in pieces.
The market also provides job for some youths and old men in Maiduguri, while the alimajiri and traditional Islamic scholars also go there to make some many for themselves. Some of these youths load the fish into the trailers and they are paid for their services and help customers to carry the cartons of fish anywhere. Gana Mohammed is one of the youths who engage in loading fish into trailers. According to him, he started the loading fish business five years ago, saying he has made ‘fortunes’ since.
Gana said: “Since I started this business, I stopped depending on anyone else, rather, people depend on me. I have been using the proceeds to help sponsor my siblings to school and also help my mother because my father died two years ago during the 2009 Boko Haram crisis. I also married last year from the money I make in this business.”
The business is not an all-comers’ affair, according to Alhaji Ahmadu, as before anybody can start selling fish in the market, he must register with the association. “Every year we pay taxes to both the state government and the Maiduguri Metropolitan Council (MMC) for the space we are using and also pay to the council on each trailer before they move from the market,” he added.
Our reporter gathered that at the height of the face-off between the Joint Military Task Force (JTF) deployed to Maiduguri by the federal government to restore order to the state and members of the Yussufiya movement also known as Boko Haram which led to many people fleeing their homes to other places the market was deserted and people coming to buy fish from other parts of the country stopped coming because of the security situation.
Bulama Bukar, one of the traders said they operated at a loss then because some of the fish began to rot. “About ten cartons of fish rotted in my store because nobody came to buy them but thank God everything is returning to normal now as you can see,” he added. The business is like any other, not without its own problems according to him. He added that the major problem they have been facing in the past 15 years is the shrinking of Lake Chad which according to him, led to reduction of fish in the water.
“Every year, the number of fish caught in the river is reducing and this is leading to high prices of fish in the market. A carton, which cost N9,000 now goes for N13,000. There is no price control. It depends on the availability of water in the river every year,” Alhaji Ahmadu said. Alhaji Abubakar Kaigama, who claimed to be one of the pioneer fish merchants in the market, lamented that the good old days are gone because of the drying of the lake. According to him, most of the people they started the fish business together has left the business for other ventures because the business is not what it used to be.
Kaigama said: “In the 60’s and 70’s you can get fish from Lake Chad which can serve the whole country, but now you can hardly serve a quarter of the population. Thank God for the new technology which makes it easy for people to build fish ponds in their compounds, but can the fish be of the same quality as the river-bred ones?” Experts attributed the problem to climate change and the human factor. It is said that the shrinking poses great danger to the over 30 million users of the lake who are fishermen and farmers who make a living from the lake.