Wonder! 75,000 children in Nigeria could starve to death within months, says UN

Boko Haram insurgency has disrupted
farming and trade in north-east, leaving
14 million people in need of
humanitarian aid

Agence France-Presse
In Nigeria, 75,000 children risk dying in
“a few months” as hunger grips the
country’s ravaged north-east in the wake
of the Boko Haram insurgency, the
United Nations warned on Tuesday.

Boko Haram jihadists have laid waste to
the impoverished region since taking up
arms against the government in 2009,
displacing millions and disrupting
farming and trade.

Nigeria’s president, Muhammadu Buhari,
has reclaimed territory from the
Islamists but the insurgency has taken a
brutal toll, with more than 20,000 people
dead, 2.6 million displaced, and famine
taking root.

UN humanitarian coordinator Peter
Lundberg said the crisis was unfolding at
“high speed”.

“Our assessment is
that 14 million
people are identified
as in need of
humanitarian
assistance” by 2017,
Lundberg said in the
Nigerian capital,
Abuja.

Of them, 400,000 children are in critical
need of assistance, while 75,000 could die
“in [the] few months ahead of us”,
Lundberg said.

The UN hopes to target half of the 14
million people – a population bigger than
that of Belgium – with the Nigerian
government working to reach the rest.

But Lundberg said the UN did not have
enough money to avert the crisis and
called on international partners, the
private sector and Nigerian
philanthropists to “join hands” to tackle
the problem.

“We need to reach out to the private
sector, to the philanthropists in Nigeria ,”
Lundberg said.

“We will ask international partners to
step in because we can only solve this
situation if we actually join hands.”

Maiduguri, the capital of north-east
Borno state and birthplace of Boko
Haram, has doubled in size to two
million people as a result of people
seeking refuge in camps for internally
displaced people.

Despite the World Food Programme
warning of “famine-like conditions”, the
UN has not declared a “level three”
emergency, the classification for the most
severe crisis that would draw more
attention and desperately needed funds
to Nigeria.

Roddy Barclay, an intelligence analyst at
consultancy firm Africa Practice, said:
“The humanitarian response hasn’t
scaled up adequately to meet a growing
demand for food, particularly in the
more remote camps in the north-east.”

Nigerian vigilante and security sources
said in September that at least 10 people
a day were starving to death in a camp
for displaced people near Maiduguri.

There is also the ongoing issue of
insecurity. Despite the recent military
gains, Boko Haram is still active in the
north-east and stages attacks and suicide
bombings.

“The Nigerian army has scored notable
military successes in containing Boko
Haram. But that’s not to say they have
stabilised the region entirely,” Barclay
said.

“Movement in remote zones remains
high risk and the focus remains
overwhelmingly on furthering military
gains rather than addressing the very
real socio-economic impact of the crisis.

Those zones include the shared borders
of Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon and Chad in
the Lake Chad Basin, said Ryan
Cummings, director at intelligence firm
Signal Risk.

“The scale of the humanitarian disaster
in north-east Nigeria has been grossly
underestimated,” Cummings said.

“There’s an estimated one million people
still living in communities inaccessible
because of the ongoing insecurity.”

Now the fear is that Boko Haram will try
to capitalise on the failure of the
Nigerian government – and the
international community – to save the
hungry.

“There are many claims that resources
allocated to IDP [internally displaced
people] camps are being misdirected into
avenues of corruption, so aid is not
reaching the people,” Cummings said.

Boko Haram could prey on that anger, he
said, warning that “they could potentially
end up being recruited back to Boko
Haram”.