The First Lady flew to Borno on Monday. She brought a food bank. The hunger was already there.

On Monday, Oluremi Tinubu unveiled the North-East rollout of the National Community Food Bank Programme in Maiduguri. She stood in front of the cameras at a primary healthcare centre in Borno State and commissioned the programme for the region. Dangote Foundation pledged N20 billion in-kind over five years. NNPC committed N10 billion. The federal government added N17 billion through the Social Action Fund. Total pledges, across all sources, crossed N65 billion.

The programme is designed to establish community-based food banks in all 774 local government areas across the country. Malnourished mothers, pregnant women, and children under six receive vouchers at health centres to access food at designated points. The target is 500,000 households nationwide.

On the same day, we reported that 35 million Nigerians are facing acute hunger.

That number is worth holding for a moment. Thirty-five million people. That is larger than the population of Malaysia. It is roughly the combined population of London, New York, and Lagos. And it is concentrated in exactly the region where the First Lady was standing with her programme.

A food bank is not the wrong answer. Access to nutrition for malnourished children and pregnant women is urgent, real, and necessary. Nobody serious argues against feeding people.

What the food bank cannot do is fix the reasons the hunger arrived. Borno's food crisis is not a distribution problem. It is the product of fifteen years of insurgency that displaced farmers, destroyed markets, closed roads, and made it dangerous to plant. Plateau's food insecurity connects directly to intercommunal violence that has been running since the 1990s. Niger and Kebbi lose harvests to bandit raids and kidnapping of agricultural workers. The north-east is hungry because the north-east has been at war, and the war is not over.

N65 billion in pledges is real money. But the Dangote pledge is in-kind over five years. The NNPC pledge is over five years. The federal government's N17 billion is a procurement fund routed through ward-level structures that have, historically, been among the most vulnerable to diversion in Nigeria's public spending system.

Governor Zulum of Borno, who knows his state better than anyone in Abuja, told the gathering that the food bank initiative is welcome. He also confirmed that he is still waiting for N68 billion the federal government approved for his state power plant.

That number did not make the programme's headlines.

A voucher for malnourished families is real help. It changes something for the mother who can redeem it. The question the food bank cannot answer is what happens in the ward that never gets its distribution centre funded, or the LGA where the voucher system is captured by the same officials who have been capturing everything else.

The hunger in Borno is not waiting. The pledges have timelines measured in years.