It was on Thursday evening, just three days before the celebration of Christmas. Aliyu Usman looked at his goods and remembered he had hardly sold 10 bags of 50kg of rice since the beginning of the month, something he had never experienced before, particularly during the Yuletide period. “By this same time last year, I remembered how people patronised the market to buy food, I even remember a man who bought like five bags of rice and jerry cans of groundnut oil to celebrate Christmas and New Year.