UNDERCOVER: In Borno, children are dying at IDP camps, foodstuffs are ‘disappearing’ at SEMA store


In October 2016, the senate began probing the alleged diversion of funds and relief materials meant for Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in Borno state. After disguising as a relief-aid donor — for eight straight days in November — in order to penetrate an IDP camp and the Borno State Emergency Management Agency (SEMA), ‘Fisayo Soyombo, editor of TheCable, presents a report that points the senate committee to the directions where it should beam its searchlights — if it is any serious about apprehending and prosecuting the government and camp officials who have been piling more misery on people whose lives have already been made difficult by the Boko Haram insurgency.


At the tender age of three, Halimat is experiencing a torture that even a 30-year-old would struggle to withstand. At the 110-bed Inpatient Therapeutic Feeding Centre (ITFC) of the Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in Gwange, Maiduguri, where she was first spotted in early November, Halima lets out a cry every time she turns on her sick bed. Almost every part of her slender body is swollen, wrinkled or bruised; half of it is bandaged. She is suffering from severe acute malnutrition, worsened by constant diarrhoea and oedema — a buildup of body fluid that results in a swollen body and causes severe pain.

A doctor painstakingly examines her body to find a vein through which to catheterise her since she cannot eat manually. After 10 minutes of fruitless search, he settles for a spot on her head just by her right temporalis. It’s all part of a string of medical process aimed at preserving Halima’s life, but it first causes her excruciating pains. Her mother, Yagana, watches in despair, arms akimbo, tears coursing down her cheeks in utter helplessness.

To be clear, Halima is in this state of pain for two reasons: first, she was let down by her country, which failed to protect her when Boko Haram insurgents attacked her household in Bama in 2014; next, she found food hard to come by, not just because of the enormity of the feeding burden on the government but because of the inhumanity of emergency managers and camp officials who “keep diverting” IDP foodstuffs.


https://www.thecable.ng/undercover-investigation-borno-children-dying-idp-camps-foodstuffs-disappearing-sema-store/amp?fbclid=IwAR2q1LHd41Ypcp4Pj577coxH1W52_0cS4GBggzxug2BlU1tVBbv4xm6rphw#.XghfpKeclC4.facebook

It's a pity. I cry for this country

People are internally displaced, meaning they have been rendered homeless for no fault of theirs. These people include women and children (even infants).

Now, resources were meant to mitigate their homelessness, and you living in duplexes with your children having the best of health care, schooling, and a host of other luxuries think the most appropriate thing is to divert these resources for personal benefit. Can a human being be more wicked?

Tell me how you, your wife and children will not be used as firewoods for hell fire?

[s]

Simplyleo:
Source?

[/s]

This doesn't interest our General.

Three days after arriving the medical facility, Halima gave up the ghost. Those who saw Yagana on the day of her daughter’s death said she was disconsolate. Amidst her wails, she was quoted to have said she had “lost all hope for the future”.

Not a difficult image to picture, really. When Boko Haram raided her village, the 100 cows that constituted her means of livelihood were seized. More than 20 of her relatives, including her husband, were killed, leaving her with six children — all severely acutely malnourished — who eat nothing other than maize porridge only every other day. Now, one of those, the youngest, had just died in the most harrowing of circumstances.

The statistics behind the crisis
Child 1
A mother cradles her sick, malnourished child

Halimat and Yagana are not alone in their misery. According to an MSF survey of the humanitarian crisis in Borno, shown to TheCable by a presidency source, 3.7 per 10,000 children under five years old died per day between December 2015 and September 2016. The sheer scale of this crisis forced the federal government, in June, to belatedly declare a nutrition emergency in Borno — belatedly because the United Nations-recommended emergency threshold is 2.1 deaths per 10,000 under-five children per day, and also because it took a survey by a foreign aid agency for the government to take the step.

The displaced persons alive are faring only slightly better than the dead. In mid-June, after 1,200 people, mostly women and children, were evacuated by the army from Bama to the Nursing Village camp in Maiduguri, MSF screened 466 children from six months to five years of age; it was discovered that 39% of them were suffering from severe acute malnutrition. Also in Bama, a rapid nutritional screening of more than 800 children showed that 19% were suffering from severe acute malnutrition.


Epicentre, MSF’s epidemiological centre, conducted retrospective mortality surveys and nutritional assessments from August 19 to September 9 at Muna Garage camp, and from September 23 to 29 at Custom House camp. At the latter, severe acute malnutrition among the children under five years old (the most severe form of malnutrition exposing children to a high risk of death) was estimated at 4.3% and moderate acute malnutrition at 15.6%.

At the former, 9.5% of the children under five were affected by severe acute malnutrition and 15.4% by moderate acute malnutrition. Therefore, a total of 24.9% of children under five years old were affected by general acute malnutrition — a rate well above the 20% emergency threshold.

All these statistics point towards a population of IDPs in severe pains, due particularly to a food-shortage crisis. Being the ones in closest contact with the displaced persons, the SEMA and camp officials ordinarily ought to be the most sympathetic about the people in their care. Sadly, findings from visits to the groups showed otherwise.

Diary: Undercover expedition to Bakassi IDP camp
Bakassi Camp
Bakassi IDP camp… the beautiful exterior

Camp and Borno state government officials have invented an ingenuous way of keeping journalists off IDP camps. No journalist is allowed entry upon arrival at the camp. Instead, he is first directed to SEMA to submit an application letter that finds eternal abode in one of the dusty files at the relief agency. The practice is to direct the journalist from one office to another, on and on until frustration sets in and he is forced to abandon the mission.

But after five days of relentless failing and retrying, I finally make my way into Bakassi IDP camp, located on Damboa Road — not as a journalist but as a potential donor of relief materials to the displaced population. I explain to the camp officials that I need to first see the camp to be able to assess the needs of IDPs, and then return at a later date with a reinforcement of relief items. I expect them to immediately facilitate my movement into the camp, but surprisingly four of them ease me out of the general office into a ramshackle, deserted room where all sorts of irrelevant questions are asked.

Bakassi Inside
Bakassi IDP camp… the ugly interior



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Perhaps there were people who were unhappy with the appointment of Satomi, as he is widely known, and they were determined to see him fail. An encounter with him was his chance to invalidate all the accusations against him. But, were he to have the benefit of hindsight, he would want that encounter to go another way.

Two of us masquerading as aid donors from the south-west arrive the SEMA office on a typically scorching morning one Thursday in November, and we are told right at the gate that we have to return for a 1pm appointment.

We return just before 1pm, and once we are in, we immediately see that Satomi wields enormous powers. There is a crowd of people, mostly elderly women, waiting to see him. Alongside the few men and children in the mix, they are all sprawling on the rugged floor in the chair-less yet expansive waiting room.

After a half-hour wait, a pleasant man carrying himself around like one of Satomi’s aides succeeds in helping us pin the chairman down to a corner, during one of the many moments he slid from office to office in the gigantic edifice. “Give me 10 minutes,” Satomi says curtly, coldly.

Thirty minutes turn to an hour, an hour extends to two. Still we wait. On that rug, we doze off, wake up, and find out we have been waiting not for 10 minutes but for nearly three hours. We seek out this aide, and tell him it’s now or never. He pleads with us to be a little more patient “for the sake of IDPs who need the kind of donation you say you want to give”.

Not long after, Satomi leaves his inner office for his aide’s, where we are luckily loitering, and his aide reminds him in courteous English that we are still waiting. It is unclear why Satomi is suddenly infuriated, but he scolds his aide in unprintable Hausa. When, on Satomi’s exit, we ask the aide if we stand a chance of seeing his boss anytime soon, the once happy man simply scowls at us.

We are still trying to figure out our next line of action when Satomi charges out of the office — and without uttering a word — dashes past us and out of the building, enters his SUV in the company of three other aides, and drives out of the premises.

“What manner of SEMA chairman refuses to meet potential aid donors, refuses to apologise for not being able to meet them, refuses to give them another appointment, refuses to delegate one of his subordinates to meet them?” my co-‘humanitarian worker’ asks me.

“No idea!” I reply.

Meanwhile, IDPs are suffering…
Hassana and Husseini are suffering from severe acute malnutrition

Had we truly been prospective donor of relief items to IDPs, we would have been frustrated by Satomi. Yet millions of IDPs remain in dire need of every help they can possibly get.

For example, 26-year-old Fatima Adamu of the Bakassi IDP camp is struggling to keep her twins, Hassana and Husseini, alive. Both babies are severely acutely malnourished and are now fighting for their lives at the MSF health centre.

Originally from Gwoza, Fatima left Yola in 2013 after one of Boko Haram’s numerous raids. She was initially at the Arabic Teachers Camp (ATC), but two years ago, she was relocated to Bakassi Camp.

Adamu: The problem is that there’s no milk for our children

“In the two years I spent at ATC, we had food prepared for us but now at Bakassi we get food rations,” she says.

“The problem is that at Bakassi, the children don’t get milk. When I accosted SEMA officials to ask why we weren’t getting milk, they said the supplier of the milk had been busy with other things.”

Yagana Bura, 30, from Dikwa LG would also be grateful to receive the kind of aid that Satomi didn’t seem to bother about. Moved from ATC to Bakassi Camp, Yagana has never had enough food at any of the IDP camps she has lived in. As a result, her child is on admission for complications from malnutrition.

“When we were in ATC, they gave us a cup of ground corn just once in a day. Usually, it wasn’t enough, so what I did was hand it over to my children while I sorted myself out,” she says.

“At Bakassi we get food but it is never enough, so it finishes before the end of the month. When food finishes, we go outside the camp to beg. In Bakassi, four people get 1bag of rice (25kg) and 1 bag of beans.”

… and their children are fighting for their lives
Nurse Tijani: Measles and chicken pox the most common consequences of malnutrition

At the Isolation Unit of the MSF ITFC, where the most severe malnutrition cases are being managed, Mohammed Lawan Tijani, the nurse, says the major complications are measles and chicken pox.

Tijani cites the case of siblings Umar, Fatima and Hussein Hudu who are all hospitalised for measles. “One person got it and the others contracted it,” he says.

There is also Fatimat Usman, aged just 22 months, suffering from whooping cough as a result of malnutrition. In the five days that Fatimat has been there, her mother, Khadijat, has known virtually no sleep.

On the next bed are Abdullahi and Ali Abubakar from Gudumbali in Guzamala local government. Ali, just four, arrived the facility in great discomfort.

“His case was really serious,” says the nurse. “He was restless; he could neither stand nor sit; he couldn’t even walk; he couldn’t eat. But now, there is remarkable improvement.”

Improving the living conditions of IDPs
Abubakar, 4, battles the complications of malnutrition

That “remarkable improvement” that Ali is making in his health condition is what IDPs need in their general living conditions. To be certain, the challenges with the grave humanitarian crisis in Borno are two: mobilising sufficient help for an IDP population that the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) puts at 1.8 million, and making maximum use of the help generated so far. While the former is another kettle of fish, this investigative work shows that a number of changes must be made for the latter to happen.

It would seem that many officials at IDP camps are having a field day deciding what gets to IDPs and what doesn’t. The challenge of monitoring the effective distribution of relief aid is NEMA’s. Were NEMA to, for instance, send its own detectives to Borno to disguise as victims of insurgency, it would unearth the full scale of the rot at IDP camps. The bad eggs at IDP camps profiting from the humanitarian misfortunes of their fellow humans must be fished out and dealt with.

SEMA itself needs maybe not exactly an overhaul but surely a management reshuffle. From the testimonies of members of the public — camp officials, displaced persons, civilian JTF — it does seem the SEMA leadership, under Satomi, has lost the trust of the people. SEMA urgently needs someone who can come in to do a thorough cleanup, the type that Dora Akunyili institutionalised at National Agency for Food Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC). To find such man of impeccable conscience and fierce love for humanity is far more complicated than it looks on the surface, but the humanitarian setup in Borno needs it badly.

Editor’s Note: All photos and videos of minors in this article were taken and published with the consent of their mothers.

Hmmm


Money made from these camps are the reasons why this boko stuff won't stop soon

Cos sometimes I wonder what boko guys are still fighting for

Chai

The north is like one jungle, anything goes

....

Sharia and Jihad for a demonic gods of Islam
Bokoharam is not ending their activities soon because it's an ideological religious political war

These people believe that Sharia is the only law they respect and obey instead of Nigeria Constitution, as long as Islam is existing in the north don't expect peace there

mauriceju2:


Sharia and Jihad for a demonic gods of Islam
Bokoharam is not ending their activities soon because it's an ideological religious political war

These people believe that Sharia is the only law they respect and obey instead of Nigeria Constitution, as long as Islam is existing in the north don't expect peace there

When you tell them that Islam is a pure political movement for merciless domination of non Muslims communities in the name of "Allah" then argument will start

I will keep on saying this, average Nigerians is self center, heartless and corrupt minded....... Our leaders have there own issues but 60 to 70% of Nigeria problems is from we follower, if we follower can get ourselves right then our leadership problems will be 99% solve. As it is right now the future is totally blink with no hope in horizon

TooMuchStuff:

When you tell them that Islam is a pure political movement for merciless domination of non Muslims communities in the name of "Allah" then argument will start

you wan shake table

megawealth01:
you wan shake table

From my moniker u can tell a higher energy being is on the prowl in Nairaland.

Hahahahahah

What a pity

The height of wickedness,
I wonder what northerners want to teach anyone about religion or spirituality with their silly sharia.

Just go to the north and see how they treat their children, no love at all