Hundreds of thousands at risk of dying in the north-east of
Nigeria!
The UN has been accused of failing to act quickly enough to
save hundreds of thousands of lives in northern Nigeria where a food crisis already
killing hundreds of people a day is poised to become the most devastating in
decades.
Nigerian authorities, who maintain tight control over
humanitarian and media access to the region, have also been accused of
deliberate negligence and attempting to conceal the scale of the crisis.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs
(OCHA) has categorised 4.4 million people in the Lake Chad region as “severely
food insecure” – meaning they are in need of urgent food aid.
Boko Haram’s seven-year insurgency has left Borno’s farmland
– which previously fed Nigeria – devastated and abandoned. This will be the
region’s third year without a harvest.
The hunger crisis is claiming lives even in Maiduguri, the
capital of Borno state and the hub of humanitarian and security forces in the
region.
Grema Terab, chairman of the State Emergency Management
Agency (Sema) in Borno – the body leading the state’s humanitarian response –
until early March 2015, believes the crisis is the result of“total neglect and carelessness on the part of the
government”. He said the government was aware of the extent of the hunger, but
failed to deliver a plan to tackle it and attempted to prevent media coverage
of the issue for fear of embarrassment.
“The government chose to conceal the issue of IDPs
[internally displaced people] because they were afraid of indictment. There has
been a lot of long-term neglect and a refusal to act upon the plight of the
IDPs and this is why starvation is occurring in most of the camps,” he said.
I shall be organising a fund raising event and shall get back to you with more information.
Culled from Guardian news: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/14/un-accused-of-failing-as-nigerian-food-crisis-threatens-hundreds-of-thousands.
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