Ibekimi Oriamaja Reports.
Today, millions of people in north-east Nigeria are suffering as a result of a deteriorating food security and nutrition crisis. Food insecurity refers to not knowing when or where your next meal will arrive. It essentially means being unable to meet your or your family’s basic needs. As a result, countless families are being forced to make horrifying sacrifices in order to survive. Many people, particularly children, are at risk of starvation during the lean season.
According to the most recent food security assessments, 4.1 million people in Borno, Adamawa, and Yobe states – three of Nigeria’s northeastern states – are at risk of severe food insecurity during this dry season. More than a decade of conflict has harmed people’s resilience and coping mechanisms.
Malnutrition becomes more likely as food insecurity worsens. In the north-east, 1.74 million children under the age of five are expected to be malnourished by 2022. Mothers who have lost children to malnutrition can attest to the dangers it poses as well as the grief and despair it brings. I saw a haunting sight of a child on the verge of death while visiting a nutrition stabilization center in the north-east, and it is a memory that continues to trouble me.
Many factors influence food security, including insecurity caused by ongoing conflict, rising food prices, and climate change. This is happening in a region where people are already extremely vulnerable. North-east Nigeria has endured 12 years of conflict and insecurity as a result of the violence of non-state armed groups such as Boko Haram. This year, 8.4 million people require humanitarian assistance, with women and children accounting for roughly 80% of the total. More than 2.2 million people have been displaced as a result of the violence. Livelihoods, health care, education, and other critical areas have been devastated, depriving millions of people of critical assistance and the ability to provide for themselves and their families.
People who have been displaced by violence have few options. Many fled to garrison towns for safety, where going beyond the towns’ protective ditches to farm or collect firewood puts their lives in danger. Many vulnerable people have no choice but to resort to negative coping mechanisms, such as survival sex, child marriages, begging, child labor, or recruitment into armed groups, in order to obtain food.
Hauwa, a mother from Rann, Borno State, has no food and must beg on the street to feed herself and her two children. But it is insufficient, and hunger has transformed her body into something she no longer recognizes. “This is not my body,” she says. Hers is just one of the many stories of suffering we hear every day.
The humanitarian community is deeply concerned about the millions of people who are at risk of going hungry during this lean season, as well as the sacrifices they will make to survive. Every effort must be made to ensure that life-saving programs that provide food security assistance and respond to acute malnutrition continue to exist. Humanitarian and government actors are prepared to expand interventions, but funding is urgently required.
A $351 million multisector response has been developed as part of the USD$1.1 billion required for Nigeria’s 2022 Humanitarian Response Plan to save lives and protect the most vulnerable. Funds are desperately needed right now, and every contribution counts.
