Category: Sunday magazine

• The flood took their homes, but it is hunger that seals their fate

• At the mercy of predators: Sad fate of widows, mothers, daughters adrift in wreckage of an unforgiving deluge

• Stripped of family, hope, their only constant is the struggle to survive

Halima Mohammed remembers her 15-year-old son, Ali, as a boy who went to bed a child and woke, mauled by floodwaters, into a man.

On Thursday, September 10, 2024, at the precise stroke of midnight, Mohammed and her children experienced nature’s wrath as water, let loose by the collapsed Alau Dam, tore through her home in Gwange.

As the waters gushed through her door, her heart pounded with a terror only a mother could know. She and her children laboured to drain their room with bowls and buckets, a frantic defence against the deluge turning their room into a watery tomb. Soon, the water engulfed their rooms, rising past her waist, cold and merciless.

Halima gathered her three daughters in a dash for refuge, but pleaded with her son, Ali, to join the neighbourhood males in rescuing the vulnerable—the children, the sick, the old. As her daughters clung to her, shivering and wide-eyed, she told her son: “Help those who cannot help themselves.”

The 15-year-old nodded in silent affirmation to his mother. The palpable fear on his face conveying his brutal awakening and chilling resonance of the moment – he was a child thrust by serpentine waters into the role of a man.

Mohammed watched as the 15-year-old waded off, slinking into the tempest, his figure faded away into the midnight currents. Amid the guttural wails of frightened families and drowning neighbours, she watched her son vanish completely from her sight. Praying silently for her son’s safety, Mohammed fled with her girls to the Kofan Biyu area.

“We attempted passing behind the government quarters but there was no road there because the water was too much, then we went to Abbaganaram. There we saw people going to the quarters area and we followed. We spent a night there but it became flooded too. So, we trekked to Baga Road, where we joined others fleeing to the Bakassi IDP camp. I’ve been here with my three girls, ever since,” said Mohammed.

At the Bakassi IDP camp, Mohammed has searched in vain, combing through faces, hearsays and memories, in a desperate bit to gaze upon her son’s brilliant eyes once more. But she couldn’t find him. She knows he was a hero that night; she dreads that he might be gone, forever. Yet she waits. “He went out to save others. He will come back,” she whispered, her voice lost in the din of her grief.

A housewife’s solitary vigil

For Helen Samaila, the flood was a thief not just of her home and belongings but of her family. In the chaos of the rising waters, she was torn from her husband and two sons. Panicking, she grabbed two of her six children, Dorcas and Rahaf, and fled with them, while her older sister managed to hold onto two others, Esther and Rufkatu. “I have six children, four girls, and two boys. So, I carried two and my older sister carried two of them,” she said.

Read Also: My unforgettable battle with traditionalists in Ota, by cleric

Samaila’s husband and two boys vanished in the surge, leaving her to confront each morning with a gnawing uncertainty. For three days, she scoured the town’s ragged camps and temporary shelters. On the fourth day, she found her sons among a wave of displaced children, weary and sunken-eyed. But her husband, Joseph, remains missing. Each night, she tells her children that their father will return soon but her voice no longer carries the strength of conviction.

“I am tired of promising them his return,” she cried, her gaze sunken, like a well of sorrow. Without her husband, Samaila is a solitary pillar bearing the weight of six young lives. Joseph was the family’s breadwinner, a humble trader at the Gamboru Psychiatric Hospital road, whose earnings from his provision store sustained the family. Without him, Samaila is left to forage on meagre handouts, her sons reduced to menial labour despite their young age. “My sons, they have become labourers,” she lamented, in the tenor of a mother who knows that they are too young to bear such a burden. The tragedy here is not just one of survival but of the innocence drained from her children, leaving them to wrestle with adult despair in a world that offers no respite. She fears the day when their faces stop asking, “Where is our father?” and start understanding the dreadful silence of her reply.

Lives trapped by circumstance

Across Maiduguri, the flood’s cruel current has left thousands of women without a lifeline. In a city where opportunities for women are scarce, wives without income find themselves stranded on the shores of devastation. The flood destroyed homes and markets and the delicate webs of dependency these women had woven with neighbours, friends, and family. Widows who had leaned on children for food, or on neighbours for shelter, now face empty doorways and unanswered calls.

For mothers without husbands or children, those whose strengths were rooted in the safety of family, the floodwaters carried away more than possessions—they stole their very means of survival. Stripped of homes, the displaced women huddle in camps where food is a scarce commodity and safety is a distant memory. They lament their vanished sons and husbands, who used to be their only support.

Each woman’s story has the same bitter end. Farmlands have been buried beneath silt and mud, and small businesses that once afforded dignity and a meagre income are now debris swept away by the flood. Without a home and livelihood, they are left as remnants of themselves, pieces waiting to be rebuilt but scattered across the broken landscape of Maiduguri.

Seventy-year-old Fatima Mustapha recalled how the flood tore into her life, ripping it apart. Paralysed with fear, the widow sat rooted in her threshold as the flood raged into her five-bedroom home in Gwange. “If I am to perish, let it be Allah’s will,” she murmured, urging her children and grandchildren to safety while the water rose menacingly around her.

She said, “The flood entered my house on a Thursday morning (September 10). I was with my grandchildren. I became afraid and told them to evacuate to a safer place. I didn’t join them I told them I would stay behind and whatever happens to me would be Allah’s will. The water entered and destroyed our five-bedroom apartment. And I was inside. I didn’t have food and water. No place for me to sleep.” But for kindhearted neighbours who rescued her, Mustapha would have drowned.

The deluge crushed her walls and swept through her life, leaving her with only the basin that had floated beside her in the murky tides. “When it happened I couldn’t pick a thing. It all went with the water. The only thing I found in the compound is my water basin. My clothes got spoilt. I lost my sister I couldn’t attend the funeral because I lost everything. I have nothing left – no food, no place to lay my head. I need food. I want a place to lay my head,” she said. Stripped of her home, Mustapha finds herself bound to the ground beneath her, longing not for luxury but for the bare essentials – food, clean clothing, and shelter.

“My sons have travelled. They’re almajiri. They are in Quranic school. They are so young because I didn’t marry early. None is old enough to take care of me,” she murmured, her voice a tremor of loneliness. Her daughters are too young for responsibility, thus leaving her to the mercy of strangers and her fragile faith.

For Zulai Bukar, terror dawned at night, in a voice that shrieked: “Water!” Her weakened limbs trembled, still frail from a recent illness, as she tried to scramble out of her house. But for a neighbour who lifted her onto his back to safety, she would have drowned. As he bore her to dry land, Bukar stared wide-eyed in disbelief, at the murky, serpentine flood. Hours after her rescue, she sat shivering, only to hear that the waters had claimed her house, her mattress, her pots, and the N20,000 she had borrowed to tide her family through the month.

“The man who borrowed me the money was compassionate. He told me forget it. I have eight children from four different husbands. I was sleeping inside the house suddenly in the middle of the night I heard loud shout saying “Water”! I exclaimed ‘Inna Lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un (Surely to Allah we belong and to Him we will all return). Initially, some neighbours came to take refuge in my house but as the flood waters rose in my home, we all had to flee,” she said.

For thirteen days, Bukar stayed in a dryland refuge, the edges of her lips cracked, her hands holding only the wind as news of her wrecked home gnawed at her spirit. “They said there was food,” she recalls, “but not a grain reached me.” Her voice quakes when she recounts the man who lent her the money, how he said, “Forget it, may Allah keep you.” But her children, displaced and wandering, were forced to halt their studies, a harsh pause on their dreams in the name of survival. “When this ends, they will return,” she promises herself, each word a prayer she dares not say aloud.

Women who once kept families afloat with modest incomes from trade or farm labour also lost everything. In an economy already bent under the weight of conflict and hardship, their losses ripple outward, casting entire families into unyielding poverty.

Until the flood broke out, Bariya Musa’s life was anchored in the small earnings from her vegetable farm. But the flood came and destroyed everything, she said. Now, she is left reliant on the sparse rations doled out at the IDP camp.

For those who lacked the fragile independence of a farm, like the housewives and grandmothers, who depended on neighbours or the small alms from their children’s earnings, the flood turned life into a maze of unending hunger and miseries. Matriarchs, who once held families together, threading the filial fabric of life with resilience, now find themselves without a single thread of security.

Desolation in displacement

The camps offer only the bleakest shelter—walls of tarp and roofs of rusted tin, buzzing with sickness and hopelessness. For women, these places are rife with peril; the nights are haunted by the spectres of assault, with predators lurking in the fringes of their fragile sanctuaries. Hunger twists their stomachs as surely as the cold hardens the ground beneath them. And as night falls, they cower together, a mass of grieving mothers, weary daughters, and shell-shocked widows, clinging to each other in a fellowship born of loss.

Outside the official emergency shelters, they flock under makeshift tents, eyes dulled by loss, bodies starved by days without food, spirits bowed under the weight of survival. Beyond the camps, the flood has disbanded families like seeds scattered in the wind. Children, once under their mothers’ watchful eyes, now roam the streets, doing whatever menial work they can find. They are the labourers, the vendors, the bearers of heavy loads on spindly shoulders. Their mothers watch with haunted pride and sorrow, knowing that each day’s small earnings stave off starvation but steal their childhood.

Widows who relied on the kindness of neighbours find themselves abandoned, as the same flood that ravaged their homes has thrown even their closest friends into survival’s relentless grip. There is no room for charity in this new world of scarcity, and once-kind neighbours now turn away, preoccupied with their losses, unable to bear the burden of others’ suffering.

This is the current fate of thousands of women, displaced by the flood in Borno. They have no bread to break, only memories of sustenance that the waters swept away. They are left to forage hope from barren ground, for where the earth was once bountiful, it is now a graveyard of their losses. And in the shadows lurks another predator—one not made of rain and river but of men who prey upon the vulnerable. In the desolate hush of night, whispers travel in the camp of women who dare not walk alone, for safety is an illusion in these places of displacement. The threat of violence hangs heavy in the air, a silent storm in a woman’s life already burdened with tragedy.

In these camps, safety is a myth, protection a fable. They sleep with one eye open, mothers lying next to daughters, haunted by the knowledge that disaster’s wake brings not only grief but wolves disguised as men.

The silent trauma of survival

There is no gainsaying that women and children compose the heart of the afflicted, bearing a unique burden of hardship. They are not only displaced from their physical homes but pushed from the fragile balance of survival. Arjun Jain, UNHCR’s representative in Nigeria, observed that the floods are a fresh wound upon open scars inflicted by years of displacement and conflict on affected communities. “Communities which, after years of conflict and violence, had started rebuilding their lives were struck by the floods and once again displaced,” he said.

According to the UNFPA’s 2022 estimate, about 6.7 million people – 80 per cent – of the 8.4 million people requiring humanitarian assistance in Nigeria are women and children and are in the three most affected northeastern states of Borno, Adamawa and Yobe. Compared to the previous year’s 8.7 million, this represents a slight four per cent decline in people in need of humanitarian assistance.

Within these population groups, some of the most vulnerable people with special needs are housewives and girls who, in some cases, face a triple burden of finding ways to survive, caring for their families and protecting themselves from sexual violence.

According to the Humanitarian Needs Overview (HNO) for 2022, an estimated 1.4 million individuals (46% IDPs, 23% returnees, 31% host communities) will require Gender Based Violence (GBV) prevention and response services in the affected states.

As the September flood recedes from the streets of Maiduguri and host villages (in Jere and Konduga) to the damaged Alau Dam, an unwieldy social crisis manifests in its wake, accentuating rising gender inequalities. The risk for women and girls multiply in real time, argued social worker, Omolara Odila.

“Women are more vulnerable during emergencies and are left to navigate hardships that men rarely face in the same way. Many of them are poor and the flood has rendered them even more vulnerable than most can truly comprehend.”

She argued that due to the widespread and systemic impoverishment of females in the disaster-prone areas, they are unable to adapt, without urgent and sustained help, to hardships foisted on them during emergencies, like the flooding that just happened here (in Maiduguri) other humanitarian disasters.

Odila maintained that women are also generally more traumatised and vulnerable to Sexual and Gender Based Violence (SGBV) and other personal safety and health challenges imposed by disasters and social inequalities between genders. “The higher incidences of SGBV may increase the number of deaths and diseases among women and girls,” she said.

Findings revealed that SGBV has surged within distressed communities, since the flood disaster. “Many child molestation and rape cases happen in the dark but they go unreported because the victims fear being shamed and stigmatised,” said Hussein Jaka Ahmedu, a haulage truck operator from Konduga. Corroborating him, his partner, Bintu Abdullahi, a grain merchant and supplier to several IDP camps in Borno, revealed that she and two of her staff recently rescued one nursing mother and her teenage half-sister from a gang of seven boys, equally displaced, who tried to rape them in exchange for food.

It would be recalled that four days after the Alau Dam collapsed, a Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF) officer reportedly molested and raped a female survivor in the reopened Bakassi IDP camp. Speaking to the press, Bintu Mustapha, one of the flood survivors at the camp, also revealed that some members of the CJTF, a local security outfit complementing military onslaughts against terrorists in the northeast region, were diverting relief materials in favour of their girlfriends and friends.

Several females face the brutality of survival on multiple fronts, not only battling natural calamities but also the malice of males emboldened by the void of law and order. Health services are scarce; when available, they are stretched too thin to provide the care so urgently required. The risk of maternal mortality grows perilously high for expectant mothers, unable to access safe labour conditions amidst ruin.

The Humanitarian Needs Overview (HNO) indicates that 1.4 million people across the northeastern states need SGBV prevention services—an overwhelming burden on an already faltering system. “Every disaster disproportionately weighs upon the women, increasing the threat of sexual violence,” said Noemi Dalmonte of UNFPA. “The cycle of vulnerability persists, leaving these women no respite,” she said.

A haunting choice: Education or survival for Borno’s girls

As mothers struggle, so do daughters too. With resources decimated, young girls often bear the brunt of domestic upheaval, compelled to forsake education to aid their families in ways few children should ever be asked. A fragile dream of school, torn apart by the rising tide, is left for the faint echoes of laughter and learning, replaced by the harsh responsibilities of survival. With schools damaged and community infrastructure gutted, their future remains anchored in uncertainty.

“I would love to return to school. I miss my friends and mistress (teacher),” said Ayisatu Da’ala from Mafa. The 12-year-old currently begs to survive on the streets of Maiduguri, alongside her mother and maternal aunt.

The physical loss of schools belies a deeper wound: the abandonment of girls’ dreams and ambitions, sacrificed to the ceaseless demands of family survival. In Borno, where literacy already hovers precariously low among women, the recent flood may have drowned a generation’s hope for a brighter horizon.

Impact on female health

Experts opine that recurrent and costly disasters related to climate change affect in no small measure, the social and health determinants of female wellbeing. Floods could damage critical infrastructure, including health and learning institutions. Damaged infrastructure also impedes access to health resources. Pregnant women, for example, could be at a higher risk, thus leading to a rise in maternal death.

Flooding, conflict and other humanitarian crises have only worsened the pre-existing severe reproductive health and GBV situations. The 2018 Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey (NDHS) reports the highest rate of sexual violence in the northeast of 16%, compared to 10% or less in other regions. Data from the 2018 NDHS also shows that the northeast has a high unmet need for contraceptives at 17% and an extremely low contraceptive prevalence rate of 2% compared with the 10% national average – which translates into a high total fertility rate of 6.3 as compared to the national average of 5.5. The region also has a very high Maternal Mortality Rate of 1,546 per 100,000 live births as compared to the national value of 546 per 100,000 births.

Teenage pregnancy is also high at 32%, a major health concern because of its association with higher morbidity and mortality for both the mother and the child. The crisis with the health system disruption has further aggravated the situation. Only 22% of deliveries are assisted by a skilled birth attendant, exposing women and newborns to increased risk of death and complications.

In flood-ravaged parts of Borno, humanitarian needs remain critical and inaccessible to women and children, among other vulnerable segments of the displaced residents. Despite the significant reduction in the number of displaced people living in emergency shelters, from a peak of over 400,000 people at the height of flooding to about 50,000 registered individuals as of October 4, according to the Borno State Government’s Emergency Operations Centre (EOC). An additional 700,000 people also sought shelter with relatives during the flood emergency, according to authorities.

In addition to population displacement, there are pressing public health concerns as many women learn to live in overcrowded and unsanitary IDP camps – without access to clean water, toilets and bathrooms, and emergency healthcare. Their desolation is further accentuated by the recent declaration of a cholera outbreak with over 300 deaths.

Many women hitherto reliant on their missing or now incapacitated husbands and children, suffer social exclusion and discrimination that limits them from education, employment and other social benefits. The flood and displacement have also aggravated food insecurity among unemployed female segments of the displaced population. Prices of food staples, sanitary towels, and other essential provisions have increased due to hoarding and inflation. Humanitarian aid delivery has also been significantly affected due to the lack of access to flood-devastated areas. Thus assistance is less likely to reach all those in need and more likely to exclude women, particularly where modalities have shifted to distribution via IDP camp chairmen further exacerbating the social inequalities that trigger lack of access of several women to urgent relief materials.

Fragments of hope

Priorities for immediate intervention among flood-affected communities in MMC, Jere, Konduga and Mafa LGAs include water and sanitation hygiene (WASH) items as well as sanitation facilities to restore dignity and safeguard health, borehole rehabilitation, disinfection, and other water supply measures.

On October 4, the Borno Secretary of State Government (SSG), Alhaji Bukar Tijjani, who is also the head of the newly established Expanded Flood Relief Committee convened a coordination forum on flood response with humanitarian partners. The SSG presented a report ‘The Impact of Protracted Insurgency and Recent Devastating Flood Disaster in Borno State, which indicated that 85,000 homes were damaged in 19 wards in the Greater Maiduguri area [MMC, Jere and Konduga LGAs] based on BSG assessments. Ongoing coordinated assessments with humanitarian partners will further inform humanitarian and development partners’ planning and programming in both temporary sites and affected wards.

According to the report, local businesses, particularly those dependent on agriculture, livestock and trade have been hit hard, with recovery at a slow pace amid a deepening food security and nutrition crisis and a public health emergency.

While the flood waters have receded in MMC and Jere, flooding continues to affect other parts of Borno State. In Dikwa LGA, over 27,000 people, many of whom have lived in protracted displacement, were displaced once again due to torrential rainfall, windstorms, and overflow from the Alau Dam and the Yadzaram River in September. Initial flooding affected 12 internally displaced persons (IDP) camps, with five completely submerged, and impacted three host communities.

To mitigate the consequences of violent conflict and increasing inequalities on women and girls, Amina Goni, an emergency social worker and consultant, advised that the state government must partner with humanitarian actors to create more inclusive community platforms, giving voice to women, people with disabilities, the elderly and other marginalised groups. Addressing stress and anger management in communities is also essential for reducing conflict. Collaborating with community and religious leaders on local health and communications campaigns could help address public health concerns and curb palliative diversion, she added. “Additionally, to ensure transparency of recovery efforts, the government must support civil society to track resource distribution while adapting livelihood programmes to aid women, girls, and the disabled in economic recovery,” she said.

Of dreams and dowries: A tidal wave of grief

With the floodwaters receding from Maiduguri and affected villages, women in Borno —already the most vulnerable due to years of displacement and economic hardship—are once more called to survive on sheer willpower. Those that survived the ravage of September; from the rivers that slithered and hissed, like wrathful serpents, to shattered homes and health risks, are left to battle alone for their safety, their dignity, and the lives of their children.

For the women left with nothing, those whose sons and husbands would never return, there is no justice to seek, only feeble hope and survival. Helen Samaila, for instance, has been wallowing in misery since her husband disappeared with the floodwaters. The possibility of his demise is a chasm of dread that she would not cross. Yet as the days slip by, she must help her six children come to terms with the truth: that their father who once provided, the husband who was her rock, might never come back.

Mothers, like Halima Mohammed, weep for the memories their missing sons left behind, for the clothes their daughters had saved for festive days – all stripped from their lives in an instant. Mohammed dreams of Ali’s return, but deep in her heart, she dreads that he might never come back.

For survivors like Zulai Bukar, the flood swallowed treasured symbols of identity and tradition. Part of her dowry, a bead necklace saved over the years got washed away with her family heirloom, leaving a cavernous emptiness where cultural pride once resided. Mustapha mourns not just the home she has lost, but the memories tied to each room.

In the aftermath of the catastrophe, grief clings to the survivors like the muddy residue of the floodwaters. The deluge has rendered them destitute not just in pocket but in spirit, robbing them of the humble independence they once nurtured. There is no path forward, no farmland to till, no petty trade to ply, no food to eat – many women are thus adrift, clinging to the debris of their former lives.

Where they once found purpose in keeping their families whole, they now wander the wastelands of grief, struggling to find footing in a world stripped of softness.

Yet, for the women of Maiduguri, survival is a burden as much as a blessing; while each day is a stark reminder of all they have lost, it also reminds them of the lives they must fulfil.

In the depths of her despair, for instance, Fatima Mustapha counts her tasbih every obligatory salat  – spreading her frail hands to the heavens, she seeks provisions denied her and thousands of women by a lack of government presence in their lives.

It is not the weight of her burden that scares her, but the reality of bearing it alone.