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OPINION: Silver lining in northeast Nigeria crisis, by Peter Lundberg

By: Bhodemarz on November 18, 2017 / comment : 0 , , , ,

Scarcely would news events from Nigeria's northeast inspire optimism. The humanitarian crisis in Nigeria, triggered by an armed conflict, is one of the most severe in the world. Yet the determination by men, women and the young to battle and survive the adversity unleashed by the long-running violence is deeply moving. Their resolve, and over the past year, an accelerated relief assistance, are making a positive difference in a region struck by one of the world's most severe humanitarian emergencies.
Since the start of the conflict in 2009, more than 20,000 people have been killed, thousands of women and girls abducted and children used as "suicide" bombers. This year alone more than 110 children have been used as "human bombs" by the group known as Boko Haram, being forced to don vests or belts packed with explosives and blow themselves up in a crowd.  Attacks on camps for internally displaced people, market places and mosques occur on a weekly basis and spread fear among people who have already witnessed the horrors of this conflict.
This crisis has engulfed the north-east of Nigeria, a vast territory almost two thirds the size of the United Kingdom. It has also spread into neighbouring Cameroon, Chad and Niger. Hundreds of thousands of people are displaced and in need of food, water, shelter, health care and protection. A cholera outbreak in August threatened to spiral out of control had there not been a swift reaction. Hundreds of Nigerian refugees have been flooding back in recent months, seeking humanitarian aid in areas that are already crammed with others who need help.
TALES OF HORROR
I have met many families since taking up the role of deputy humanitarian coordinator one year ago. Of the many chilling accounts of persecution at the hands of attackers I have heard, one recounted by Alhaji is etched in my mind. I met him at a run-down petrol station just outside Pulka, a small, and once sleepy town near the Nigeria-Cameroon border. He was captured alongside others when a group of armed men raided their village. The assailants went on to kill 17 of his neighbours in front of his eyes. He miraculously managed to escape and found his way to Pulka, now home to 20,000 displaced people.
When I met Alhaji, 30 and father of four, he was still searching for his wife and three of his children. While he survived, his arms are nearly paralysed from having been viciously tied up to a tree for hours. But there he was, not just hanging on, but actively trying to make the most of the support we can provide for him to be reunited with his family and rebuild their lives.
SIGNS OF IMPROVEMENT
Not all is doom and gloom. There are signs that security is returning in some areas and this is positive. Indeed, over 1.3 million people have returned home in recent months and are trying to kick start their lives, which mainly revolve around farming. These people still do rely on aid, for example seeds and tools, but will eventually resume normal life.
The task ahead remains immense with 1.6 million people still displaced and people continuing to flee violence on a regular basis. The United Nations and non-governmental organisations, at the request of the government of Nigeria, are providing lifesaving humanitarian assistance to the people who most need it. In 2017, we launched an appeal of over $1 billion to do this. Today, 68 per cent of our appeal is funded. This means we still need $350 million to protect, feed and support millions of vulnerable people. That is a staggering amount. 
I am, however, optimistic. Donors, including the U.K. government, have generously supported our work and hundreds of thousands of people are receiving food, safe drinking water, latrines, health services, vaccination campaigns, nutrition supplements, education and much more. The massive increase in humanitarian aid delivery this year is remarkable, and is helping to avert famine. But we need to do more.
As the conflict enters its ninth year, we must keep up the life-saving work. We must keep talking about what is going on in the north-east of Nigeria, both here and abroad, and the abhorrent atrocities that people endure. And we must continue to hope that peace is right around the corner. That is what will bring this humanitarian crisis to an end.

Peter Lundberg is the United Nations deputy humanitarian coordinator in northeast Nigeria.



Source: Thomas Reuters Foundation News

OPINION: The torturable class, By Saratu Abiola

By: Bhodemarz on October 18, 2017 / comment : 0 , ,

In one of my favorite novels by British novelist, Graham Greene, called, “Our Man in Havana,” a Cuban policeman, Captain Segura, explains to the British spy Mr. Wormold on who gets to be tortured in his country’s class system.
“The poor in my own country, in any Latin American country. The poor of Central Europe and the Orient. Of course, in your welfare states you have no poor, so you are untorturable. In Cuba the police can deal as harshly as they like with émigrés from Latin America and the Baltic States, but not with visitors from your country or Scandinavia. It is an instinctive matter on both sides. Catholics are more torturable than Protestants, just as they are more criminal.”
I thought of this quote during this year’s International Day of the Girl which comes, as it always does, on October 11. This year, UNICEF teamed up with American online publication The Daily Beast to post a special feature on girls who have had to raise children born of sexual violence from forced marriages with Boko Haram insurgents, in the northeastern part of the country. When many girls manage to flee the insurgents, they often face stigmatization in their communities and have had to live in camps with these children, where they remain vulnerable to violence and abuse.
This story follows a 27 September report released by Amnesty international detailing the abuse and exploitation that women and girls, like the ones in the story, experienced at the hands of Cameroonian soldiers, from early 2015. However, a most damning detail worth noting from that report is that, the Nigerian army worked with the Cameroonian army to forcefully deport these Nigerian-displaced persons, from Cameroonian camps.
It is true that there have been improvements in security in the country’s northeast and that the government has done some work to improve the humanitarian situation. It is also true that the trauma of having fled horrific violence from one’s home could make one reluctant to return, and that recent reports of Boko Haram killings and kidnapping, lends to the narrative, that the armed group is far from defeated. Indeed, a study released on October 11 by the Norwegian Refugee Council has 86% of the displaced people surveyed saying they are afraid to return to their homes. The need to support a preferred government’s narrative of returning normalcy to the embattled northeast, with hitherto displaced Nigerians now returning to their hometowns, cannot be more important than keeping ordinary Nigerians out of harm’s way.
While it is clear that the Cameroonian government is deporting Nigerian refugees en masse and often refuses them political asylum, the Nigerian government has a responsibility to its citizens to protect them. People not wanting to return to a volatile situation is entirely understandable. However, our government knows that in interacting with torturable people, there can be no debating, no discussion, no incentivizing. Their reasons for doing things cannot possibly be based on any kind of logic because they are inherently unreasonable. This is not, after all, much of a departure from the logic that tells us that the vision of Lagos as a second Dubai is enough reason to forcefully evict poor Lagosians from their homes, or that the need to affirm the non-negotiability of Nigeria’s unity is enough reason to Nigerian army’s violence in the southeast. Violence in response to people from a torturable class is a feature, not a bug.
The most-scary thing about how we have come to define who belongs to the torturable class and who does not, shows how ephemeral wealth in Nigeria can be. Most Nigerians are a missed paycheque from dire straits. The wealthy among us know this too well; after all, that is why so many amass of wealth for its own sake — rather than doing what so many of their wealthy counterparts in other parts of the world do, like invest in the arts or set up foundations that fund causes – because even with all the money they have, they are just as stuck in survival mode as the rest of the country. They know their place at the top of the food chain is not assured and do not believe that they will fare well if the market was truly competitive, so they use what money they have to buy favourable political outcomes. This happens in even more development democracies, but the difference is that there is no political counterweight to this strength here. There are less grades of torturable and non-torturable.
The differences between the most non-torturable and the most torturable are, therefore, far starker.There is no class more torturable than those who have lost their homes and are at the mercy of the state. In order to adequately address the challenges, we face, Nigeria’s government will have to do something that we know is against its nature: to protect those it is used to harming. You can be the country that deals with challenges facing its most vulnerable, or you can be the country that aids and abets their abuse and exploitation. You cannot be both.

Source: guardian.ng

Boko Haram: Frustrated IDPs ask to be allowed to trek home

By: Bhodemarz on September 24, 2017 / comment : 0 , ,

The Bama Initiative for Human Development, an NGO, on Sunday in Maiduguri staged a peaceful demonstration demanding the return of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) to their respective communities in Bama.
The group’s chairman, Muhammad Hassan, said that the IDPs would want to return and continue their normal activities in view of the prevailing peace in the state.
Mr.  Hassan noted that about 70 per cent of the reconstruction and rehabilitation projects had been completed in the area, saying that they were tired of living as displaced persons.
“We are in Maiduguri for more than three years without meaningful means of livelihoods. The condition of our people is pathetic.
“The elongation in the process of returning displaced persons to their homes is moving at a snail pace and exposed them to unbearable conditions.
“We could no longer send our children to school; many have died of hunger and starvation. Most of us live in host communities and no one is supporting us,” Mr.  Hassan stated.
He said that most of them were traumatised worsened by serious neglect and poor living condition, adding that they are ready to trek back to Bama.
The police, however, stopped the demonstrators from embarking on the trek and urged them to drop the idea because of safety.
Damian Chukwu, the Police Commissioner in the state, said that the group had not notified the command over their planned return to Bama.
He advised the IDPs to dialogue with the state government and other stakeholders over their demand so that adequate preparations would be made.
“The police have a duty to protect you and we will not allow you to gather people and expose them to danger in the name of home return.
“Also, there is massive reconstruction and rehabilitation works going on in the town, executed by the Federal and State Government under the Bama Initiative.
“We will not allow you to go because of your safety, you better go back and wait for the time when government will permit your return to the town,” he said.
In his reaction, Governor Kashim Shettima urged the IDPs to cooperate with government to fast-track the completion of rehabilitation projects in the town.
Isa Gusau, the Special Adviser to the Governor, Communication and Media Strategy, made this known in a statement issued in Maiduguri.
“It is to the government’s advantage if IDPs return home because their return will lessen economic burden of supporting them as displaced persons.
“The greatest wish of the governor is the safe and dignified return of all IDPs to their communities. Much as he wants the IDPs to return, he is also concerned about their safety.
“Gov. Shettima is consistently committed to the ongoing rebuilding of private homes, police stations, hospitals, schools, water facilities, markets, council secretariats and other essential services in communities across 15 local government areas of the state,’’ he said.
Mr. Gusau explained that government had constructed 20,000 housing units in Bama and provided modern health facilities, schools and police stations in the area.
He added that the federal government was currently training a special Anti-Terrorism Squad and Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF) to be deployed to the town under the Bama Initiative.
The spokesman added that the special squad and the agro-rangers, specifically trained to secure farmers in their farmlands would replace the military.
“We have to ensure that there is full return of civil security before IDPs can return.
“The governor encourages safe and dignified return only after putting the right things in place,” Mr. Gusau said.
According to him, the state government had re-built houses and re-settled displaced persons in parts of Kaga, Konduga and Gwoza Local Government Areas of the state.
The News Agency of Nigeria reports that thousands of persons were forced to flee their homes when the Boko Haram insurgents sacked Bama town in 2014.
Hundreds of people were killed, maimed or abducted while the entire structures in the town were razed by the insurgents.

(NAN)
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