Boko Haram has caused a huge humanitarian crisis. Former National Security Adviser (NSA) Col. Sambo Dasuki is being accused of stealing the funds voted to acquire weapons to fight the extremists. But Sambo says he did no wrong, adding that he is ready to face trial. In this Washington Post article, KAREN ATTIAH highlights the crisis.
AT this time last year, Boko Haram seemed ready to deliver on its promise to establish a caliphate in the Northeast
The Islamist extremists, whose name roughly translates to “Western education is a sin,” had managed to amass enough firepower and military sophistication to overpower the ill-equipped military and overtake an area about the size of Belgium in northeastern region in a period of six months. Hundreds of thousands were displaced. A multinational force consisting of troops from Chad, Niger, Benin and Cameroon have made significant progress in retaking captured territory and pushing the extremists back.
But, Boko Haram’s tactics have evolved, turning from coordinated military operations to suicide bombings, Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) and reportedly poisoning water supplies. An estimated 1,000 people have been killed since President Muhammadu Buhari took office in May. Since 2009, the Boko Haram insurgency has claimed almost 20,000 lives in Nigeria alone.
Indeed, headlines have been filled with the death tolls from Boko Haram’s suicide blasts, army pronouncements of militants killed or captives rescued from Boko Haram camps. But, less coverage has been devoted to the dire plight of those who have been forced to flee Boko Haram, or the state of restoring governance in the northeast. A true victory over Boko Haram must address the resulting humanitarian crisis that is still burning in the Northeast.
The latest numbers from International Organisation for Migration (IOM) show that 2.1 million people have been displaced due to the conflict with Boko Haram. Within Nigeria, about one million have been uprooted from Borno State alone. While the government has set up camps for internally displaced people (IDPs), only about eight to 10 per cent of the IDPs live in the camps, instead staying with friends, relatives, community leaders or makeshift settlements of their own, which makes tracking them extremely difficult. Since most aid goes to the government camps, those who have created settlements or who are staying with host families are largely on their own.
In an interview, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Antonio Guterres explained how complicated the displacement dynamics are in the region. “There is overwhelming displacement inside Nigeria,” he said. “Until now, I would say there is an insufficient capacity for response from the Nigerian authorities, and also an insufficient involvement from the international community as a whole. I must confess it is one of the most challenging humanitarian operations in the world.”
I took a trip to Nigeria to see the situation for myself. I was invited by the American University of Nigeria (AUN), located in Yola, Adamawa State, to give guest courses, but of course, I took the opportunity to investigate the humanitarian situation there. As Boko Haram’s violence reached a crescendo last year, Yola — a town with a normal population of about 300,000 — absorbed 400,000 displaced people from Northern Adamawa and Borno State. Now, as Boko Haram has been degraded by regional military offensives, the numbers of the displaced in Yola have dropped to around 200,000, according to local leaders.
The Adamawa Peace Initiative (API), a coalition of local religious and community leaders, has been at the forefront of the humanitarian response in Yola. The coalition told me it gets little to no help from the government or the international community in caring for IDPs. With support from AUN, API organises mass food distributions for IDPs who have fled to Yola. I watched as 1,500 IDPs, mostly women and children, filled the sanctuary of St. Theresa’s Cathedral, where they received 25-kilogramme bags of maize, cooking oil and seasoning. Organisers estimated that each feeding would last a household about two weeks.
I heard inspiring stories of locals in Yola opening up their homes to people fleeing from violence, even going so far as to give farmland to displaced farmers in need. But in a region where poverty rates are the worst in the country, how long can such communities bear the burden? Sarah Ndikumana, Country Director of the International Rescue Committee, said: “It’s desperate not only for the displaced, but also for those who are hosting. The host communities are tapped out. Their resources are long since exhausted. Even in our assessments, in some cases the host communities are worse off, or definitely as bad off as the displaced that are living with them. They’ve doubled or tripled their household size, and now they don’t have anything to spare anymore either.”
I took a 12-hour trip from Yola to the towns of Michika, Madagali and Mubi as part of a military-escorted aid convoy organised by API. Michika, Madagali and Mubi had been claimed by Boko Haram during their military advances but were retaken by military forces. Amid a beautiful backdrop of lush crops, rolling hills and rivers, towns were still littered with evidence of Boko Haram’s physical carnage: downed powerlines, abandoned tanks, burned schools, destroyed churches. In many instances, locals were the ones repairing infrastructure, not the government.
Civilian vigilantes, many of whom are farmers armed with nothing but juju guns and magical amulets to protect them from violence, still manned road checkpoints made from tree branches and sandbags. In each town, we stopped at churches as members of API distributed food and medication to displaced people living in communities. I saw little military presence in any of the towns I visited.
Buhari has pledged to defeat Boko Haram militarily by December, though he admits that guerrilla-style attacks may take longer to end. The government wants to close IDP camps by December. In some places, the government was distributing fliers encouraging IDPs to go back home. But with Boko Haram still launching deadly suicide attacks and with infrastructure still destroyed in many areas, the government is not providing security for IDPs to return safely home, especially in areas near Boko Haram’s hideout. Joseph Jidda, a local in Madagali, spoke to me as he was receiving food aid from API, next to a church in Madagali that had been destroyed by Boko Haram. He said he lost his wife in a Boko Haram attack last year. “Up to now, Boko Haram, they are there,” as he pointed toward the dense Sambisa Forest reserve, the extremists’ notorious hideout. “Fifteen minutes by bike, they can come here. They come in the night to take food.” He said that two weeks before, Boko Haram had come, killed seven people and taken food and medicine. After he said that, my blood ran cold as I came to the realisation that our aid distribution had just made this town a target for Boko Haram. Tragically, I was right. Several days after my visit, suspected Boko Haram attackers hit Madagali. Two female suicide bombers killed 11 people fleeing from the attack.
The United States (U.S.), through USAID, is supporting a range of programmes and humanitarian efforts in the Northeast totalling about $87.1 million in Adamawa, Borno, Gombe and Yobe states. USAID has no personnel in the region, instead relying on a number of organisations to carry out the work. USAID has a $20 million humanitarian and food assistance programme, part of which includes a cash and voucher programme for food for IDPs in Gombe, Yobe, Borno and Adamawa, and a $12.9 million Regional Transition Initiative designed to target the conditions that have allowed for Boko Haram to flourish. The programme is aimed at addressing youth vulnerability to violent extremism, reducing perceptions of marginalisation and improving government responsiveness to citizens. USAID officials declined to say which groups were funded to work on this initiative, citing security reasons. The task ahead of humanitarian responders is daunting, but during my trip, I could not help but wonder whether enough of the millions of dollars in aid promised was reaching people in need. Bishop Stephen Dami Mamza of Yola, one of the founding members of the Adamawa Peace Initiative, whose church is hosting 851 displaced people in a camp, said they had not been reached by the voucher initiative. “There were some organisations, like the Red Cross and UNICEF, they promised us they were going to make this kind of provision for our IDPs (in March or April), but up to now, we have not seen anything. They have not followed with action. I thought it was a wonderful idea, and I was anxiously waiting for that to happen, but it has not happened.”
What especially worries aid officials and local leaders I talked to is the potential for food insecurity. “Nearly all the displaced are farmers, said IRC’s Ndikumana. “There are rural populations that are displaced into urban areas. They have no way to get access to land. That means very little food coming in, and it’s anticipated that its going to remain a huge issue until basically the next harvest, a year from now.” According to the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, a significant portion of the Northeast is in near-famine and will be until 2016. However, there is a perception that the government has enough money to contribute more to humanitarian efforts and that it should be doing more. In Adamawa, Ahmed Sajoh, the state’s information commissioner, said the Federal Government had not yet shown up in a big way to help. “The Federal Government had launched a Victim Support Fund, and we are yet to be given support from that fund. We haven’t seen efforts by the Victim Support Fund to help us in rehabilitation and helping return people back to their homes.”
One thing that crept up into conversations during my trip among community leaders and government officials was the idea of reconciliation and how to regain the social trust that has been broken by Boko Haram — in Yola, especially, where Muslims and Christians freely mix. “The insurgency has introduced an elements of destabilisation of our body politic,” said Sajoh, who is Muslim. “There are a lot of mutual suspicions among our people. Although we have evidence that quite a number of fighters are not Muslims, the thing has an Islamic coloration. And because it has an Islamic coloration, there is a tendency to look at it as Islam versus non-Muslims, and as such, our communities are fragmented now, with a lot of mutual suspicion. There are people who also take their time to report innocent people to security agents as Boko Haram. People would do that to settle historically old scores. This has created a kind of social instability. We as a government need assistance in a social re-engineering process that will restore confidence back in each other as a community.”
Christian leaders underscored the need to address religious tensions now before they become the fuel for a security challenge in the years to come. “Reconciliation is one of the major issues that we really have to address as religious leaders,” Mamza said. “Boko Haram has destroyed the fragile peace we have, particularly in those areas where Boko Haram occupied. We have to find a way of speaking to our people that not all Muslims are Boko Haram. If we leave it, the tension will be there, and in the future, it may become a serious crisis in the community.”
I asked Mamza whether any members of his congregation had trouble trusting Muslims. “People are seriously hot, people are angry,” he said. “In fact, I had somebody come to tell me that if he sees any Muslim, as members of his family were killed, he feels as if he should attack them. This is the kind of anger that is there among the people, because of what has happened. So, these kinds of people, they need a lot of healing, a lot of support so they will be able to overcome this anger.”
