There is a fresh mass displacement of up to 65,000 citizens in volatile North-East Nigeria as a spate of crashes involving armed security forces and insurgent groups.
The United Nations says the situation in the troubled region is threatening humanitarian assistance, as armed groups go “house-to-house” hunting for aid workers.
Despite improvements in the humanitarian situation in the Lake Chad region, the latest development is forcing millions to continue remaining dependent on lifesaving assistance.
A top United Nations relief official is already urging greater international support for the region to safeguard the progress achieved.
“There is still a big humanitarian crisis. [It is] not over despite the progress we have made”, UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Mark Lowcock told a high-level humanitarian conference on the region.
At one of the earlier meetings at an UN-backed conference in Oslo, Norway, donors pledged over $650 million towards emergency assistance programmes in 2017 and beyond.
These resources helped achieve a significant scale-up in the humanitarian response, reaching more than six million people with assistance, and averting a famine in North-East Nigeria.
However, humanitarian needs continue to grow and so do the resources needed to respond.
Of the $1.58 billion required for 2018, only about $600 million (38 per cent) was received as at 2018.
“The appeal we had on the humanitarian response plan this year has been generously financed but not to the degree where any of us can be comfortable that we can meet the needs of the people we can reach, still less of those we are still trying to reach”, added Lowcock, urging additional funding and resources.
Some ten million people across the four countries – Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad and Niger – remain dependent on assistance. At the same time relief workers face severe challenges reaching the worst affected due to Boko Haram violence, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
Alongside life-saving humanitarian response, addressing the underlying cause is vital to ensure a lasting solution to the crisis, highlighted the UN relief chief, noting the need to scale up longer-term resilience and development assistance as well as promoting stabilisation.
“If we can make more progress with peacebuilding, good governance, the creation of jobs and education opportunities – and the respect of human rights – we work indeed with the underlying issues and this is what we need to do”, he said.
Organised by OCHA and the UN Development Programme (UNDP) together with the Governments of Germany, Nigeria and Norway, on 3-4 September 3-4, 2018 in Berlin, the conference seeks to maintain the momentum from last year’s Oslo conference and increase and expand internationally support.
It was expected to reinforce an approach combining the response to immediate humanitarian needs with addressing the root causes of the crisis in a way that leads to sustainable, resilient development.
Of the sectors desperately needing resources is education, an area that often lacks funds in humanitarian emergencies.
With someone thousand schools reported to have been closed or rendered non-functional due to violence or unrest across the region, ensuring access education “can be both life-sustaining and life-saving”, said Manuel Fontaine, the Director of Emergency Programmes at UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), in a news release on Monday.
“Education supports children and young people’s lifelong learning. It gives them the necessary skills to build a better future for themselves and their families and to contribute to peaceful and prosperous communities. Yet too often overall humanitarian education funding is lacking in emergencies.”
UNICEF has called for $41.7 million to meet the education needs of children in the crisis but has received just 8 per cent of this amount in the first half of 2018.
Other sectoral priories include food security and nutrition; emergency shelter and non-food items; protection; health; water, hygiene and sanitation; and early recovery.
In the meantime, the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) spokesperson, Babar Baloch, said in Geneva “up to 65,000 Nigerians are on the move following a series of attacks by armed groups on Damasak town, in North-East Nigeria’s restive Borno State.
“Initial reports indicate that eight people were killed, and a dozen injured.”
Echoing those concerns, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported several incidents in the town since Sunday, April 11.
“Humanitarian assets have been targeted, including the destruction of at least five NGO offices and several NGO vehicles, a mobile storage unit, water tanks, a health outpost and a nutrition stabilisation centre”, said OCHA spokesperson Jens Laerke.
Civilian targets
Non-state armed actors were also “conducting house-to-house searches, reportedly looking for civilians identified as for aid workers”, he said.
This was despite the fact that aid operations and humanitarian facilities were a “lifeline for people in northeast Nigeria who depend on assistance to survive”.
According to OCHA, the attacks will affect support to nearly 9,000 internally displaced people and 76,000 people in the host community, who are receiving humanitarian assistance and protection.
In the latest reported attack on Wednesday – the third in seven days – UNHCR’s Baloch explained that “up to 80 per cent of the town’s population – which includes the local community and internally displaced people as well – had been forced to flee.
Assailants looted and burned down private homes, warehouses of humanitarian agencies, a police station, a clinic and UNHCR facility.
Describing the situation as “extremely critical”, OCHA’s Laerke insisted that if the attacks continue, “it will be impossible, maybe for longer periods of time, for us to deliver aid to people who desperately need it” – his comments coming as UNHCR noted that its staff had relocated out of Damasak, temporarily, this week.
Civilians fleeing the violence include Nigerians and Niger nationals, Baloch said, explaining they had made for Borno state’s capital city, Maiduguri and Geidam town in neighbouring Yobe State. Others crossed into Niger’s Diffa region.
Years in the making
Years of insecurity and insurgency in Nigeria’s northeast has created a massive humanitarian emergency in the Lake Chad Basin.
To date, it has uprooted some 3.3 million people. “More than 300,000 are Nigerian refugees, more than 50 per cent of them are hosted in Niger and Diffa region – where these refugees, where thousands of refugees are now arriving from Nigeria, already hosts a quarter (of a) million refugees from Nigeria”, Baloch said.
