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.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/14/un-accused-of-failing-as-nigerian-food-crisis-threatens-hundreds-of-thousands