North-east Nigeria displacement crisis continues amid ‘increased sophistication’ of attackers, warns UN

An upsurge in violent attacks in crisis-riven north-east Nigeria has displaced nearly 60,000 people in the last three months, the UN migration agency, IOM, said.

Armed extremists, notably Boko Haram militants, have contributed to a decade-long humanitarian crisis in Borno, Adamawa and Yobe (BAY) states, that has spilled over into the Lake Chad region.

“Since November we’ve seen 59,200 [displaced],” IOM Nigeria’s Chief of Mission, Frantz Celestin, said in Geneva, noting that in the last two years, “we have not seen that many people on the move”.

Amid ongoing insecurity, humanitarian access is limited, hampering the ability of aid agencies to assess needs comprehensively.

Tens of thousands of civilians have fled into already overcrowded camps, mainly in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state.

Overcrowding in protection camps ‘one of our biggest problems’

“One of our biggest issues in north-east Nigeria in addition to the security issues is the land, access to land,” Mr. Celestin said. “We have a number of camps that are overcrowded, in fact, if we were to take all of the camps together, we would have more than 249,000 people in camps that are completely congested, with Monguno (Borno) being the largest one of them.”

Rumors of an imminent attack are enough to convince communities to flee, the IOM official explained, noting that people had sought refuge in neighboring countries of the Lake Chad region.

In 2018, according to the UN humanitarian wing, OCHA, 7.7 million people in Nigeria were in need of humanitarian assistance, and 1.7 million people were classified as “food insecure” between October and December.

Original source: UN News
Published on 05 February 2019