Médecins Sans Frontières(Doctors Without Borders) says UN agencies failed to respond to warnings
after Boko Haram devastated food production in Borno state
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.”
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.”
Source: theguardian.com
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