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75,000 children in Nigeria could starve to death within months, says UN
theguardian
Boko Haram insurgency has disrupted farming and trade in north-east, leaving 14 million people in need of humanitarian aid
A mother holds her malnourished baby at a health facility in Maiduguri,
north-east Nigeria, in September. The UN has warned tens of thousands of
children may starve to death in the region within months.
Photograph: Stefan Heunis/AFP/Getty Images
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”.
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