A slender girl ambled through Lagos Street in Maiduguri, Borno’s capital, clutching a nylon pack. Her long, flowing Jilbab (outer garment) sidled back to reveal a stump where she used to have her right hand.
Determinedly, she crept off the tarmac on to the dirt road that leads to Satus Hotel, the lodge housing clusters of United Nations agencies’ expatriates and Nigerian staff.
As she approached the gates of the inn, two armed guards sprang through the barricades in front of the inn, guns cocked, and fingers curled around their rifles’ trigger. They barked at the girl to stop. She didn’t.
She seemed bent on getting through the gates, into the hotel. At that juncture, one of the armed guards ducked behind the pile of sandbags. Warily, his colleague stepped forward, issuing a “last warning” to the girl to halt “for the last time!”- his lips quivering in tandem with his restive feet.
In that instant, a cab driver leapt out of his vehicle to duck behind the hotel’s security blockade; his passenger, a Caucasian female, fled out of the vehicle towards fellow expatriates approaching the hotel on foot, causing them to beat a quick retreat.
“They think I have come to throw bombs. No. I do not know how to throw bombs. I have only come to sell caps. My name is Shona. I am from Bama. I was not born like this. I was not born this way. Boko Haram made me this way,” she said, fiddling the stump of her right hand.
Shona’s ordeal started the night insurgents of the dreaded terror sect, Boko Haram, invaded her neighbourhood in Bama. The 16-year-old watched helplessly as her right hand was severed from her body.
“They killed my parents and my only brother on that night. They tried to take me away but when I refused, the leader of the squad hacked at my hand with a machete. He cut off my left hand,” she said.
Shona recounted with grief and a mien that suggested among other things, a visceral lust for vengeance; her ordeal in the violence that extinguished her family and turned her ancestral land into a ghost town.
Then she fell silent, staring ardently into the distance. It was a macabre silence replete with spasms of blood-curdling angst, misery and discontent, three-years old.
Like Shona, Muhammed Abubakar suffered the gruesome end of Boko Haram’s bloody campaign in Nigeria northeast. Abubakar, 32, lived in peace with his wife, Fatima, and two-year old son, Hadji Muhammed, until he was abducted three years ago, by Boko Haram insurgents, who stormed his community on the outskirts of Cameroon.
They whisked him off to Sambisa Forest, where he was forcibly recruited as a foot soldier. Abubakar lived in Sambisa for two years. During those years, he tried to escape thrice. At his third try, Commanders of the terror sect, lost patience with him, thus they amputated his left leg and right hand. Then they set him free.
“Fool, you can escape now. You are of no use to us or anyone now,” they taunted him. Abubakar bled and writhed in his own blood for three days. It was a miracle that he lived. He was given no analgesic neither was he accorded the luxury of first aid treatment of his wounds.
He said: “I bled continuously for three days. They cut off my hand as if I was an ordinary goat or livestock.”
At the risk of contracting life-threatening diseases, he clung desperately to life, hoping for a miracle.
That miracle came in the form of a rescue by the Nigerian Army. The latter freed Abubakar during a decisive onslaught against his captors in Sambisa Forest. Boko Haram was dislodged from the forest and Abubakar and thousands of the terrorist group’s captives regained freedom.
Maimed in infancy
And in a sequence that continually replays like scenes from a horror movie, gunmen invaded
14 month-old Aisha’s village in Bama, around 5 a.m, bombing and razing houses recklessly.
Her mother, Aisha Goni Lawal, revealed that she stepped in the bathroom to bathe soon after she bathed and dressed her child. But she had to rush out to save little Aisha, when the invaders struck and set their house on fire.
Through the fumes and crackle of the flames, Aisha Goni struggled to put on her clothes rescue her child. Her mind whirled frighteningly when she discovered that little Aisha was ablaze; the infant burned and screamed in agony as her mother divested her delicate frame of the burning clothes. She wrapped her protectively in her Hijab and dashed out of the house into the bush.
They spent three days in the bush, hiding from Boko Haram insurgents. Eventually, they escaped to Konduga on a bicycle. Afterwards, they got on a bus leaving for Maiduguri.
Little Aisha spent roughly a year and two months in the hospital, nursing severe burns over nearly half of her body.
Eventually, she underwent a four-hour surgery; surgeons used flesh from her thigh to reconstruct her eyelids, adding flesh to the top and bottom lids. One of the child’s upper eyelids had been turned inside out, and the doctors warned that leaving it unfixed meant Aisha could lose the eye itself due to unprotected exposure. Her exposure to the flames also welded her left arm to her armpit. Surgeons did a skin graft to free the arm from the attachment. Consequently, scar tissue and burnt skin still cover visible parts of her body and half her head.
After spending days in the trauma and intensive care unit at the hospital, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo visited her and offered to foot the cost of her medical expenses.
And while Hadjara Mahamadou may seem luckier than Aisha, she wears a veil that covers her head and shoulders. Hidden beneath this garment, the eight-year-old has a bandaged stump instead of a right arm. When Boko Haram raided her home town of Baga three years ago, Hadjara fled the gunmen with her mother. As they fled, hand in hand, the little girl was struck by a bullet.
But the insurgents were so close that her mother, Hassana, couldn’t afford to pause. She picked up her bleeding daughter and ran until they found a boat heading to Chad. For the next 12 hours, Hadjara travelled across Lake Chad with a bullet lodged inside her right arm.
“I took off my veil and I used that to bandage her arm,” said Hassana, the girl’s mother. Hassana’s prompt action probably saved Hadjara from bleeding to death but it couldn’t save her limb from being amputated. By the time they got to Chad, Hadjara’s arm was beyond saving; the limb was eventually amputated at the district hospital in Baga Sola.
Like Hadjara, 12-year-old Isa Lawan, had his right arm amputated. But unlike the girl, he didn’t suffer a gunshot, rather his arm was surgically removed following injuries from a Boko Haram attack in Maiduguri.
A worrisome trend
The plight of minors and adults disabled by conflict, no doubt, compels a grisly narrative. For the victims, the path leading to adolescence, is dangerously rigged with insecurities that explode like landmines, often snuffing out their lives or leaving them maimed and handicapped even before they make it through infanthood.
According to the United Nations Children Education Fund (UNICEF), about 800,000 children have been forced to flee their homes as a result of the conflict in northeast Nigeria between Boko Haram, military forces and civilian vigilante groups. In a report released one year after the abduction of more than 276 schoolgirls in Chibok, UNICEF revealed that the number of children running for their lives within Nigeria, or crossing over the border to Chad, Niger and Cameroon, doubled in just less than a year.
Until the Nigerian Army reclaimed northeastern territories previously dominated by Boko Haram, paths leading into Borno, Yobe and Adamawa States were littered with ghosts and entrails of lives horridly cut down; dismembered limbs, pierced eyes, ear slivers, jaw splinters, gouged lips, odd tibias, skin flaps, and toes clutter the roads like glowworms and slugs in the wake of bloody bomb blasts.
The howl of infants, teenagers and students maniacally butchered, maimed and gunned to death in their sleep and the sorrowful tenor of their parents’ ceaseless cries mutually resonated a macabre plot of civilisation gone awry.
Across the states, major townships and villages protruded with burnt-out cars, houses and blood spatters extending grotesquely through terrain that has proved fertile ground for radical ideologies to take root. Amid the mire, the ghosts of underage victims of the bloodbath, lunged horrifyingly from memories and graphic accounts of their deaths by loved ones and witnesses to their end.
Although the affected regions currently enjoy a fairer deal, courtesy the military’s dislodgement of Boko Haram from their streets, the defilement of the provinces’ ancient glory and more worrisomely, the devastation of lives of the region’s innocent minors linger in the hearts of the residents. They resonate chillingly in the imagery of victims handicapped by the conflict.
For children in particular, flight across state and international borders can be dangerous and uncertain, subjecting many to exploitation and abuse. Families often become separated in the process of flight and many children fall ill and in extreme situations lose their lives for lack of proper health care, according to Idiat Bello, a social worker. Bello noted that many children in flight are usually in need of special attention. That is because at a crucial and vulnerable time in their lives, they are brutally uprooted from their comfort zones and exposed to extreme danger and brutality.
In times of conflict, traditional systems of social protection come under severe strain or break down completely and there are often high levels of violence, alcohol and substance abuse, family quarrels and sexual assaults according to Peter Adamu, a Zinder and Abuja-based psychologist and refugee aids volunteer.
Like life and death travellers
Ultimately, many displaced people must fend for themselves, or rely on poorly run, insecure camps. Many of them disappear into cities, squatting with family or friends, struggling to survive on their own. For too many of them, the tragic massacre and devastation that marred their lives will continue to afflict their psyches like happenstances that happened only yesterday and reoccur in real time.
Many infants and adults are caught in the past by the unresolved question of missing parents, husbands, wives and children respectively. Across the various IDPs camps in Yola, Maiduguri, Jos and Abuja, many of the IDPs particularly women and children, have received little help in dealing with the trauma they experienced.
Many of them are traumatised in some way or another yet, very few of them understand and appreciate the need for psychosocial support, partly because they did not know such a thing existed and partly because, it would be embarrassing to admit they needed help.
A young woman, Hameeda, described her feelings of desolation. She often thought of suicide, she said. Hameeda saw her father and brother killed; she was then raped and had a gun thrust so deeply into her vagina that she will never be able to bear children. Like many other traumatised women, she chose to speak to the reporter, a stranger whom she would never see again, as a way to find brief release not available in her daily life.
The peril of unresolved trauma
One very recent study of trauma in non-conflict situations indicates that there may be gender differences in the response to trauma. The study found that, although the lifetime prevalence of traumatic events is slightly higher for men, women run twice the risk of developing post-traumatic stress disorders, suggesting that certain types of trauma may have a deeper and longer-term psychological impact on women and girls.
Of course, it is not only women’s mental health that is important. Healthy psychosocial adjustment of men and boys who have experienced violence and conflict is also important to their families and communities. There are numerous indications that combat exposure and post-traumatic stress in men lead to higher levels of substance abuse and domestic violence. There is also some evidence that post-traumatic symptoms can abate for years, but then return in later life, particularly in stressful situations. This has implications especially for women as caregivers.
The responsibility of care for others is so embedded that even in the most desperate conditions, women still try to take care of everyone around them. Often times, many women and girls express despair and regret over their inability to help as they watched their loved ones suffer or die, as they watch their children suffer abuse or starve or when they had to leave elderly relatives behind as they ran for their own lives. The guilt and helplessness that the women felt in these situations, and still feel, is an almost unbearable burden.
At the same time, the social responsibility of caring for the ill or disabled adds heavily to the workload of women in conflict and post-conflict situations. For instance, Annata, has a child who had been severely disabled by a stray bullet. His name is Mohammed and she disclosed how her whole day is taken up with feeding and washing the child and helping him cope with his disability.
ICRC to the rescue
Recently, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) initiated a measure to assist victims handicapped in the terror war. The non-governmental organisation (NGO) set up the limb-fitting workshop at the hospital in August 2016 to provide prosthetics to amputees from the three northeastern states worst hit by the Boko Haram insurgency, which has claimed about 20,000 lives and left thousands of others with life-changing injuries.
“Half of the 262 patients we have fitted with prosthetics are (Boko Haram) war victims,” said the head of the project, Jacques Forget, in a recent interview.
The prosthetic limb cost nearly $700 (about N271, 000), thus pushing it prohibitively out of the reach of many who need it, the ICRC plans to open a similar workshop in Maiduguri, in order to meet the region’s huge prosthetic demand.
This is undoubtedly good news to handicapped victims of the protracted insurgency in the northeast. Within and outside the region’s Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps, the life of the maimed remains insidiously bleak. For handicapped kids like Shona, the dispossession is absolute. She has lost her family, her home and precious limb. The teenager cuts a doleful portrait of sorrow and resignation.
But she always tries “to remember the happy things,” she said. It is unclear what memories she summons to find happiness. Perhaps she remembers the streets and vacant lots, where she navigated adolescence with neighbourhood friends classmates.
She probably recollects too, with a wince, the times they played dress-up and tantrums they conjured in their several girl wars, until they retired home to family, safety and sleep.
Yet for the teenager, it’s never memorable to recollect or imagine the dog-packs and vultures roaming her wrath-torn Bama, digging for unclaimed relics of her slain family or bombed out neighbours. It is never pleasing to remember the cold-blooded insurgents aiming at dawn through dusk into their crowded markets and living rooms.
Today, Shona’s homeland is a vast acre of rubble; where pitched and roofless houses, upended stonework and sunken stairs resonate intense dialogues of loss and tragedy. This minute, 16-year-old wanders across Maiduguri’s hostile suburbs, seeking that which no longer exists: a friendly face, a cozy bed and the certainty of a warm meal.