The United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) has revealed that a staggering 300, 000 Nigerian kids may lose their lives this year.

This, the body says, could come as a result of malnutrition without intervention to save them, just as stakeholders are of the opinion that the Nigerian government has not helped fund or implement its nutrition policy since it was passed two years ago.

Daily Trust reports that an estimated 1.6 million children are at risk, and many of them are from malnutrition, which is likely to rise to severe malnutrition if there is no intervention.

Arjan de Waqt, the chief of nutrition at UNICEF, who made the revelations while addressing a townhall meeting on nutrition in Abuja on Friday, February 19, said:“We have become deaf to these numbers. We have accepted these numbers. We don’t find it strange, unless it is your child, then it is no more a number.

“At least 280,000 of them don’t have to die, if you give them ready-to-use-therapeutic food, and you need government support for that,”he noted.
Dr Philippa Momah of the Civil Society Scaling up Nutrition in Nigeria (CS-SUNN), a coalition of nongovernment groups working on nutrition, lamented the non functionality of the National Strategic Plan of Action on Nutrition (NSPAN) which is owned by the government.

He said:“How can a policy be developed for 2014 to 2019—it is 2016 and there’s no funding for it?”

The group also stated that despite the fact that the 2016 federal and state budget had been finalised,“nutrition was not seen as a priority issue in a country where over 11 million under five children are stunted.”