A desk built to keep the market page honest

Velantis began with a simple frustration: two people quoting the price of garri in the same week could be forty naira apart, and neither figure said where it came from. We started visiting markets ourselves, writing down the stall, the date, and the person who quoted us, and building the habit into something a reader could actually check.

The desk has grown slowly, the way a good harvest does. We still send recorders to markets in person rather than relying on secondhand reports, and we still note when a figure is thin or a season's data is incomplete, because pretending otherwise would defeat the purpose.

What drives the work now is the same thing that started it: a trader, a cooperative, or a newsroom should be able to look at a price and know exactly how it was reached.