Nigeria is in need of $164 million in
humanitarian funding to prevent thousands
of deaths from malnutrition in its war-torn
northeast, a United Nations humanitarian
coordinator said this week.
The ongoing conflict between Nigeria’s
military and the Boko Haram insurgency is
to blame for the growing hunger crisis in the
northeast, humanitarian officials say.
The seven-year-old war has disrupted
planting and marketplaces, killed more than
20,000 people and forced 2.7 million to flee
in Nigeria and neighboring Cameroon, Chad
and Niger, reports VOA.
“We’ve got as many as 250,000 children in
the northeast of Nigeria who are severely
acutely malnourished and we could lose up
to 50,000 children before the end of the
year if we don’t scale up right now,” Toby
Lanzer, the U.N.’s regional humanitarian
coordinator for the Sahel, told VOA.
The northeast coordinator for Nigeria’s
National Emergency Management Agency
Muhammed Kanar said camps in the
northeast set up to house people displaced
by the Boko Haram conflict are swelling
with new arrivals.
“The situation is getting overwhelming,
because of the liberation of [displaced
people] from local governments, liberated
communities,” Kanar said.
One camp in the town of Monguno recently
grew from 4,000 people to 30,000, and he
expects it to grow further.
Lanzer said 4.4 million people in
northeastern Nigeria are “severely food
insecure,” but the country doesn’t have the
resources to tackle this problem alone.
Drop in oil price hit country hard
The price of oil, Nigeria’s top export, has
declined globally, and the country has been
particularly hard-hit by militant attacks on
its petroleum infrastructure that have
dropped production from around two million
barrels per-day to about 1.5 million barrels.
The economy contracted in the first quarter,
and many economists believe Africa’s
biggest economy is poised to enter a
recession. Last week, the IMF’s
representative in the country told Bloomberg
News that he expects Nigeria’s economy to
shrink overall this year.
Lanzer says international donors need to
step in to stop thousands of deaths from
malnutrition.
“Nigeria’s fiscal situation is such that the
country is stretched. And to expect Nigeria
to step up all the way to type of levels of
assistance that are required may be a very
big ask for the international community,”
Lanzer said.
In total, $221 million needs to be raised for
the four countries affected by the fighting
and resulting food insecurity.
The crisis may worsen. Last week, the
Famine Early Warning Systems Network said
famine could already be occurring in parts
of northeastern Nigeria that aid agencies
can’t reach.
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