The UN has been accused of failing to
act quickly enough to save hundreds of
thousands of lives in northern Nigeria
where a food crisis already killing
hundreds of people a day is poised to
become the most devastating in decades.
Nigerian authorities, who maintain tight
control over humanitarian and media
access to the region, have also been
accused of deliberate negligence and
attempting to conceal the scale of the
crisis.

The UN Office for the Coordination of
Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has
categorised 4.4 million people in the
Lake Chad region as “severely food
insecure” – meaning they are in need of
urgent food aid.

Toby Lanzer, UN assistant secretary
general and OCHA’s regional
humanitarian coordinator for the Sahel,
said: “This is about as bad as it gets.
There’s only one step worse and I’ve not
come across that situation in 20 years of
doing this work and that’s a famine.”
“We have to step in and quickly or we
are going to have hundreds of
thousands at risk of dying in the north-
east of Nigeria.”


Boko Haram’s seven-year insurgency
has left Borno’s farmland – which
previously fed Nigeria – devastated and
abandoned. This will be the region’s
third year without a harvest.
The hunger crisis is claiming lives even
in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state
and the hub of humanitarian and
security forces in the region. The city
has doubled in size in two years and
now hosts 2.4 million displaced people.
Food prices are soaring in the markets,
where it now costs $100 (£75) to buy a
large bag of rice.


Lanzer said UN agencies have not had
the resources necessary to tackle the
crisis and has called on international
donors to prevent a greater catastrophe.
Of the $279m (£210m) required, only
$75m has so far been secured.
Isabelle Mouniaman, head of Médecins
Sans Frontières operations in Nigeria,
said MSF has been raising the alarm in
northern Nigeria for two years and UN
organisations have failed to respond.
“We’ve been calling to the UN, to the
headquarters of Unicef, WFP [World
Food Programme], OCHA and their
response has been ‘Yes, we’re doing this
and that’… But you cannot just be
satisfied to say you built X number of
latrines, delivered X bags of food when
people are dying. It’s not enough,”
Mouniaman said.
“The Red Cross is doing their job, MSF is
doing their job, but the vast majority of
humanitarian organisations are failing
in their responsibility towards the crisis
in Borno.”
This is about as bad as it gets.
There’s only one step worse ...
and that’s a famine



Toby Lanzer, UN assistant secretary
general
International aid agencies have focused
on Maiduguri’s overstretched camps,
but more than 80% of displaced people
in the city, around 1.9 million people,
are living among the community, the
vast majority without access to food aid
or medical support.
The most desperate crisis is unfolding
outside Maiduguri, where aid agencies
fear hundreds of thousands of people
are trapped, cut off by Boko Haram and
the military operation against them. As
the Nigerian army clears more of these
areas, the true scale of the crisis is only
just becoming clear; those who have
escaped tell of watching children die
from hunger and being prevented from
calling for help.
Mouniaman said: “We’re talking about
areas in which 39% of children have
severe acute malnutrition. This is a
really, really dramatic situation. In my
whole MSF career – since 1999 – I’ve
never seen anything like it.”



In June, a humanitarian convoy reached
Bama, Borno state’s second largest city.
It was recaptured by the Nigerian army
in March 2015, but the 37-mile journey
(60km) from Maiduguri is still
considered too dangerous to make
without military escort because of Boko
Haram attacks and landmines.
They found Bama destroyed and a camp
of about 30,000 people, mostly women
and children. Many were starving. MSF
found the graves of 1,233 who had died
in the camp, 480 of whom were
children. More than 3,000 severely
malnourished people were evacuated by
the state governor to Maiduguri for
emergency treatment. Several died en
route.








The Guardian was refused entry to
Bama by the Nigerian military on
security grounds. But Maj Gen Leo
Irabor, who leads the military operation
against Boko Haram in the region, said
hunger in the Bama camp was
“relative”.
“Very largely I think their needs are
being met,” Irabor said.
Several people evacuated to Maiduguri
agreed to speak to the Guardian on
condition of anonymity. One man, a
civil servant, said he had seen people
die every day in the camp as a result of
hunger and poor sanitation.
Food rations were delivered once a day
by civilian militia and distributed by
local community heads. This was often
raw rice, which there was no means to
cook. Complaints about hunger and
deaths were ignored.
“How many times we cried out or we
complained … But when we were in
Banki, the army confiscated all our
mobile phones. If the army saw you
making a telephone call, wow would
they give you a beating,” he said.





Humanitarian agencies are still
struggling to get an idea of the scale of
need in tens of towns they have not
been able to reach. In Mondugo last
week, MSF estimated 100,000 displaced
people were in need of assistance; this
week, their revised estimate was
200,000. There is even less information
about large communities in Dikwa,
Konduga, Gwoza and Kale/Balge, where
the situation is thought to be even worse
than in Bama.
Grema Terab, chairman of the State
Emergency Management Agency (Sema)
in Borno – the body leading the state’s
humanitarian response – until early
March 2015, believes the crisis is the
result of “total neglect and carelessness
on the part of the government”. He said
the government was aware of the extent
of the hunger, but failed to deliver a
plan to tackle it and attempted to
prevent media coverage of the issue for
fear of embarrassment.
“The government chose to conceal the
issue of IDPs [internally displaced
people] because they were afraid of
indictment. There has been a lot of
long-term neglect and a refusal to act
upon the plight of the IDPs and this is
why starvation is occurring in most of
the camps,” he said.
“The IDPs are kept under lock and key
because they don’t want them to
communicate with the outside world.”
The current Sema chairman, Satomi
Saleh, told the Guardian these
allegations were “blackened lies and
political connivances”. He said Sema,
alongside the National Emergency
Management Agency, has reached
150,000 people in the camps in
Maiduguri with food assistance, but
admitted the crisis has now exceeded
Nigeria’s ability to respond alone.





A nutritional emergency has been
declared in Borno state, where the
governor, Kashim Shettima, is now
working closely with UN agencies. The
WFP was invited into Nigeria by the
government in March to assist the relief
effort. They are rapidly scaling up their
operation and now hope to reach more
than 700,000 with food aid by
December.
“I don’t think anyone was quick enough
to understand how serious the situation
was. We can criticise each other, but the
main point is … what are we going to do
to make sure this situation doesn’t
deteriorate,” Lanzer told the Guardian.
“We can make every plan on earth ...
[but] if we do not get resources from the
donor community very little of that will
actually happen.”



Culled from guardian.co.uk

Hope those in authorities can start to do something quickly about this, and not to dismiss it with the characteristic, arrogant, Nigerian wave of hand.