Over 50 scantily clad children had quietly negotiated a corner where they lazily eased into the day’s hours. They are hungry. No plays in the mud. No dances. Their parents have been queuing for hours. The promise of relief materials from the National Emergency Management Agency was still that- a promise. The sanitary condition is demeaning. There are no lavatories or bathrooms. Makeshift tents are daily constructed – some from bed sheets, blankets, or worn out wrappers. In an adjacent field of the community secondary school, people went about rebuilding their lives as best as they could.
No provisions had arrived since government agency showed up once after the insurgency attacks. Even then, the relief materials brought were for cold regions. Many people died in the camps from unattended wounds, hunger and diseases. Infants are particularly susceptible as mothers have no sufficient breast milk to nurse them. No one would dare go to the city for fear of attacks by Boko Haram. For most Nigerians in the north east, it is about pushing it one day at a time. This is the new normal.
Insurgency, farmer-herder conflicts and natural disasters have contributed to the 3.3million internally displaced persons in Africa’s most populous nation.
Nigeria has the highest number of displaced nationals in Africa and the third on global scale behind Syria with 6.5million and Columbia with 5.1 million. The attacks were grisly and massive. The plot is similar in villages attacked in Gwoza, Chibok, Bama, Damaturu, Yobe, Michika, Benue, Bondong, Attakar,Sanga and several such settlements.
Survivors recount hearing deafening sporadic gun shots from various parts of their villages, then a horrific moment of people running helter skelter; some running into the swords and bullets that silenced or incapacitated them. Next houses are torched and food stuffs raided into waiting vans. Bodies litter streets and foot paths. After what seems like forever, the ground beneath them was silenced of their vibrations as their thumping hearts take over. Fear is palpable in eyes. Tears flow freely. Acquisitions from hard years of toil vanish in a brief moment.
“ It’s still like a night mare, I want to wake up,” said Bitrus Bature. He had lost his father, wife and five children in the Gwoza attack. His wife was buried in the rubble that was once their home. His father and three children were buried in a mass grave. The bodies of two of his children could not be identified. He suspects they were part of the dismembered parts sprinkled in the grave. Many of Bitrus’ neighbours share same fate. They wound up with nothing- no family, no means of livelihood-and worst of all no hope of intervention by the government of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
To say that Nigerians in camps are dogged and resilient is projecting them far cheaper than what they have proved themselves to be. They have survived adversity, hunger, thirst and lack. They have borne neglect by a government to whom they pay tax to. They have tolerated corrupt government officials who report administering to them aids that they never receive and compensations they never get.
There are still too many immediate needs to consider. Large scale rebuilding effort is a tall order. The relationship they had with the ground they walk on will forever be altered.
Nigerians are accustomed to suffering and smiling and their adjustment to
disaster has always been their strongest point.But this will prove to be their biggest challenge yet. Things do not get any easier. Government’s neglect made the situation much worse. Nigerians now live in large numbers as refugees in much poorer countries which treat them better. Thanks to Cameroun, Niger and Benin Republic.
It should now be evidently clear what has happened and is still happening. Security and welfare of the people which is the primary purpose of government have been abandoned to secondary and tertiary issues like politics and politicking. Perennial farmer-herder conflicts have been allowed to degenerate to wars that consume. And although a final death toll may not be computed, it would well be that Nigeria would have lost over 200,000 of its own since the insurgency and farmer-herder conflicts took a vicious dimension.
More than half of the places where people exodused would never be inhabited by their original inhabitants because those more powerful will prey on weak survivors while painful memories will marinate hard enough to deprive some other people from returning. Villages may never be cleaned up from human remains. Thousands will be displaced and dwell indefinitely on streets and foreign lands. They will battle for survival and the hard conditions that come with these new arrangements. They will wrestle with the second, third or whatever class status their new living conditions thrust on them.
This will certainly create a new wave of issues where young people will make poor choices that will kill them- drugs, crime, and sexual promiscuity. Children will be born into a bleak world where hope is a distant word and nationality would be a new frame of reference. Older people will skate on the fine line between insanity and dying.
Please do not think that I am talking about any other country than Nigeria. I am talking about our own people, fellow nationals, people who one day had life running smoothly for them and in the next had their warm feet in a cold world. We have forgotten about them. We watch them everyday on television and hear about them on radio and social media but these stories have become all too familiar that they have lost their human appeal to us. We gloss over newspapers and skimp over the news to something new. That new news is what I bring to us this week: That these people’s lives cannot diminish while ours remain whole-there is a chord that connects all humanity which should not leave us comfortably in denial.
My point is not to say it is hopeless because it isn’t but yesterday’s ways of dealing with these problems is just not working. It is not enough to say we believe in this country and its unity then turn around to do something else. It is not sufficient to say we have a country running yet we leave thousands of our nationals on the outside looking in.
The laws are clear under International Guiding principles 5-7 IDPs are entitled to all rights stipulated in domestic constitution and legislation as well as international human rights instruments and customary law..Once persons have been displaced, they retain a broad range of economic, social, cultural, civil and political rights including the right to be protected from physical violence, the right to education, freedom of movement and residence ,political rights such as the right to participate in public affairs and the right to participate in economic activities(Principles 10-23).Displaced persons also have the right receive help from competent authorities in voluntary, dignified and safe return, resettlement or local integration, including help in recovering lost property and possessions.
