Mangu maize market: Expansive heritage of a maize-growing land

Every Friday, women, men and children mainly from remote villages of Mangu Local Government Area (LGA) of Plateau State squash into rickety buses and small trucks which barely provide enough space for them and their grains for onward movement to Mangu town.

Young and old farmers, eager wheelbarrow pushers and enthusiastic taxi drivers who shuttle from Jos and other towns to Mangu, all converge in what is believed to be the largest and busiest local market in Plateau State: the Mangu Maize Market. People similarly come from distant lands, even from down south and up north of the country.

“Igbo bulk buyers send money from the East to us; we buy in bags as they request and send to them,” a purchasing agent at the market, Sunday Danladi, told Weekly Trust, explaining how it works: “Igbos doing maize business in the East are some of our major dealers. They used to come by themselves but improvement in information technology has meant that they can send money to our bank accounts, and we can cash the money, buy the quantity they want, and send it to them.”

The Mangu Maize Market, located in the town of Mangu, headquarters of the Mangu LGA, is reputed to be the biggest of its type, at least in Plateau State.
Large-scale buyers in far-flung places, including the South-eastern part of the country, as hinted by Sunday Danladi, rely on the market for their supply. And they buy in thousands of bags every week,
Danladi who shed further light on the business, said, “My particular customer is based in Aba, Abia State.

Every week now I buy about 1,500 bags and send to him. That’s my own customer only. There are other big buyers in the South East and even the South South like my own that my colleagues work for. We have people based in Onitsha, Enugu, Owerri, Port Harcourt, and such other places.”
Wholesalers of maize also visit the Mangu market weekly from the far north.

The vice chairman of the Mangu chapter of Plateau State Traders and Marketers Association, James Jwantu who attested to this when giving an overview of the Mangu Maize Market, said, “There are smaller markets in other parts of Mangu LGA and beyond, but this is the most popular to which people come from far and near to sell and to buy maize. People come from different states: Borno, Kano, Sokoto: they come to Mangu to purchase maize. Every Friday, big trucks come from such places to buy maize, hundreds of trucks. Trucks start loading from Friday and would still be loading up to Sunday.”

The Mangu Maize Market is a small village of its own located next to a general produce market, the Mangu main market itself, which also features mostly agricultural produce: beans, groundnuts, potato, yam, sugarcane, and so on. The Mangu Market is a vast commercial territory that justifies the large size of the Mangu LGA, with a population of 294,931 people, according to the 2006 census, placing it third in the list of Plateau LGAs by population size, coming after Jos North which is home to 420,300 people, and Jos South with 306, 716 people. And nearly all the maize traded in the Mangu Maize Market comes from within the Mangu LGA.

While both Jos North and Jos South fall within the Jos metropolitan city and boast of relatively few farmers, Mangu, which lies about 77 kilometres south of Jos, is a semi-urban settlement with a huge farming population.

James Jwantu who affirmed the intense agrarian nature of the LGA, told Weekly Trust: “We have a big market of farm produce because a great majority of us are farmers. We who live in or are indigenous to Mangu love to farm. We all farm. If you are from Mangu, even if you reside somewhere else and are probably engaged in some other business or in a white collar job, you will send money home for people to farm for you.”

Jwantu said the maize market is particularly huge because maize is Mangu’s number one crop: “Maize is our leading crop. That is why, now or during harvest time, you cannot find a maize market that is bigger than this one in the whole of Plateau State.

It is offseason for the Mangu Maize Market. A first-time visitor now would be confronted with a vast market place dotted with big bags being packed full with maize from smaller bags or from the ground surface where some of the maize is sundried before being loaded into the bags.

To be seen also on a market day are various sizes of motor vehicles that have brought maize from farms or are waiting to load maize from the market. But all who spoke to Weekly Trust said the market is much fuller when maize harvest peaks.
They put the peak period at between November and February. James Jwantu said, “Peak season starts around middle of October and runs through November, December, January, and February.

There is not much maize now, but if you come here in December, you would not be able to count the bags of maize that go out of here.” Sunday Danladi who currently buys 1,500 bags of maize for his South East dealer, said, “Peak season begins in November, when I could get as many as 3000 to 4000 bags.”