BREAKING NEWS, Cover, Featured
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The humanitarian crisis in the internally displaced camps in the North East States of Nigeria is worsening due to starvation, diversion of food meant for displaced persons by corrupt officials and poor sanitation
| By Anayo Ezugwu | Aug 8, 2016 @ 01:00 GMT |
THE gory tales of starvation and deaths flowing from the internally displaced persons, IDPs, camps in the North eastern part of Nigeria which has been on for weeks may worsen. This is because the United Nations Fund for Children, UNICEF, which has been one of the major organisations working to bring relief to the inhabitants of the camps who were displaced from their homes by the Boko Haram insurgency, has suspended its activities until security situation in the area improves.
The decision of the UNICEF came in the wake of an attack by unknown assailants on its humanitarian convoy. The convoy was traveling from Bama to Maiduguri in Borno State, Nigeria, returning from delivering desperately needed humanitarian assistance to the IDPs.
“UNICEF can confirm that a UNICEF employee and an IOM contractor were injured in the attack and are being treated at a local hospital. All other UNICEF, IOM and UNFPA staff are safe.
“The convoy was in a remote area of northeastern Nigeria, where protracted conflict has caused extreme suffering and has triggered a severe malnutrition crisis. This was not only an attack on humanitarian workers. It is an attack on the people who most need the assistance and aid that these workers were bringing,” the United Nations said while announcing its temporary suspension of assistance missions in a statement Doune Porter, chief communications officer of UNICEF Nigeria, made available to Realnews on Thursday, July 28.
Prior to the attack, about 24000 displaced persons in Bama, who long to return to their homes and farms have been facing serious deprivations and untimely death from hunger and malnutrition. About 15,000 children who also live there are most affected. Some of them have been dying daily. The latest photographs emanating from IDPs camp in Bama, Borno State, show the camp is drenched in misery. This made Medecins Sans Frontieres, MSF, an international medical charity, to describe the scarcity of food supply in the northeast as a humanitarian disaster.
On Wednesday, July 27, the MSF confirmed that severely malnourished children are dying in large numbers in northeast Nigeria as food supplies are almost running out. Also known as Doctors without Borders, the MSF has urged the United Nations to set up emergency food transports to the area, where up to 800,000 civilians have been cut off for over a year. The MSF, which carried out a rapid survey of the population in Banki, estimates that extremely high mortality rates of approximately four per 10,000 people per day is four times the emergency threshold. In the town of Bama, the MSF teams estimated that 15 percent of children are suffering from life-threatening malnutrition.
The MSF had previously stated that six malnourished children die daily in the IDP camp in Bama, where poor living conditions were prevalent. Just like in the other IDP camps in Yobe, Adamawa and Taraba states, women and children have no access to water, sanitation, dignity, basic shelter, and most of all, food.
The situation has spawned a crisis, one in which 188 people died in the month of June due to diarrhoea and malnutrition. More than 1,200 graves near the camp were dug in the past year (and), almost 500 of which were for children, it said.
Realnews investigations in Maiduguri, confirmed that the situations in the IDPs camps in the state are devastating and that the worst hit camps is in Bama in Maiduguri while that of Jere is a bit better. The situation in Bama camp is attributed to the inability of the IDPs to go back to farms as a result of insecurity.
“The situation is a large-scale humanitarian disaster. There is a vital need to have a food pipeline in place to save the population that can be saved. We are talking at least about pockets of what is close to a famine,” said Bruno Jochum, general director, MSF.
The MSF has for the umpteenth time drawn attention to the catastrophic humanitarian emergency unfolding in the north-east camps. In June, the MSF said nearly 200 refugees fleeing Boko Haram militants starved to death over the past month in Bama, Borno State.
According to the MSF, about 30 people died every day due to hunger or illness in IDP camps it visited. Under military escort, an MSF team delivered some 40 metric tonnes of food last week to Banki, a town of 12,000 near the Cameroon border, including emergency supplies for more than 4,000 children.
The agency is not the only global body to voice concern on the severe food scarcity in refugee camps inhabited by people displaced by the Boko Haram insurgency. The UN says 3 million people in the northeast are in urgent need of food aid, but that some roads within Nigeria are unsafe for convoys due to mines.
Corroborating the position of MSF, earlier in July, the UNICEF said almost a quarter of a million children in parts of Borno State are suffering from severe malnutrition. The UNICEF warned that tens of thousands will die if treatment does not reach them soon. In areas where Boko Haram militants had been in control, UN says it found people without water, food or sanitation.
The humanitarian crisis in the camps is worsened by revelations that items and funds meant for IDPs in various parts of the country are being diverted. On June 23, the House of Representatives mandated its committees on emergency and disaster preparedness; loans, aids and debt management; and IDPs, refugees and initiatives on North-east to investigate allegations that the donations and their disbursement of materials meant for the displaced persons were being diverted. It noted that the federal government, local donor groups as well as wealthy individuals have committed funds for the same purposes, worrying “that despite all the donations, a large number of these IDPs are living in hunger, very deplorable and unhygienic conditions without any rehabilitation in sight.”
Similarly, Ibrahim Magu, chairman, Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, expressed worry over complaints of corruption in the IDPs camps. Magu said the complaints came from international humanitarian organisations and other civil society organisations that were donating relief materials to victims of the Boko Haram insurgency in the north-east, camped in different parts of the country.
“We want to be sure that there is transparency, accountability and judicious use of the money allocated to Internally Displaced Persons in Maiduguri and elsewhere,” the EFCC chairman stated while visiting the reopened zonal office of the commission in Maiduguri. “What we are doing is gathering intelligence but the culprits behind the sufferings in the IDP camps will be invited sooner or later by the EFCC.”
The main culprits appear to be civil society groups and non-governmental organisations claiming to be working for the interest of the IDPs. There are also individuals and government officials involved in the wicked enterprise of taking advantage of the IDPs. Recently, some officials of the National Emergency Management Agency were caught changing the bags which contained rice procured by government, compassionate Nigerians, and foreign donors for the IDPs to different ones in order to resell them.
Recently, the Nigerian Security and Civil Defence Corps in Borno State arrested some men alleged to have duped IDPs in the state into buying fake forms for relief materials to the tune of about N27 million. The suspects were said to have sold 9,000 forms at N300 each to IDPs in some camps in Maiduguri with the promise of providing them special relief materials from the federal government.
The diversion of materials meant for the IDP has not stopped some agencies from assisting the suffering IDPs. Recently, the United Nations World Food Programme, WFP, delivered 30 metric tonnes of food and other items in the affected areas last week, in a cross-border operation from Cameroon.
Some non-governmental organisations and other stakeholders working with the IDPs in the country are also urging the federal government to demonstrate political will to address malnutrition issues. Three non-governmental agencies, Centre for Women and Adolescent Empowerment, YellowJerrican Foundation and Proactive Gender Initiatives made the call on the need to develop a common template to enhance better care for the displaced persons in Nigeria. Even the Bring Back Our Girls, BBOG, group in June warned the government against playing politics with the humanitarian situation in the North East. It stated that the fortunes of the IDPs in the country have not improved. Specifically, the group said many of the IDPs were at present dying as a result of starvation in apparent response to reports that the African Union had given the government a pass-mark in its handling of IDPs.
Adaora Onyechere, head, YellowJerrican Foundations, said the current malnutrition crisis in IDP camps in Nigeria should be nipped in the board to avoid losing a whole generation of citizens. She said it was a wakeup call to corporate organisations to join hands with the government to provide the right kind of nutrition for more than 3.3 million people displaced by insurgency in the northeast and northwest of Nigeria.
She stressed that the problems currently hindering the wellbeing of the displaced persons are Nigerian problems and must be addressed with Nigeria solutions. On the issue of data, Onyechere called for the need to have a collective central data source to enhance adequate distribution of food to all the camps. She lamented the difficulty faced by the Civil Society Organisations in providing support to both the National Emergency Management Agency and State Emergency Management Agencies catering for the IDPs.
The strident calls by stakeholders on the precarious situation in the northeast may have prompted the Nigerian Senate to request the federal government to release necessary funds from the Service Wide Vote in the 2016 budget. The Senate also asked government to make use of the Victim Support Fund under Theophilus Danjuma to give urgent intervention to curb the problem.
Also, the Senate Committee on Special Duties was mandated to carry out a fact finding visit to the troubled states of Adamawa, Borno and Yobe to ascertain the true challenges of the IDPs. The Senate further urged the federal government to coordinate immediate fund raising with the private sector to ensure that no Nigerian child or woman dies of malnutrition while commending governments of affected states and neighbouring states for their efforts in accommodating and feeding some of the IDPs.
The senate position is especially important as severe malnutrition kills one million children annually worldwide. Most of the casualties occur in war-ravaged areas. While hunger affects all human beings, it is more devastating for children. In 2015, 98 out of the 450 persons who died in 28 Nigerian IDP camps were children, according to the Borno State Government. The camps recorded 6,444 malnutrition cases.
Boko Haram launched Islamic jihad (holy war) against the Nigerian state in 2009. Since then the terror sect campaign has killed more than 20,000 and destroyed agriculture in the region. Now even without lifting a gun, those the terrorists displaced from the homes and farms are now increasingly dying of starvation. What a tragedy!
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