Aid workers have made shocking revelation of the state of havoc being experienced by displaced persons in northern Nigeria.
According to The New York Times , starvation in northern Nigeria’s Borno State is so bad that a whole slice of the population — children under 5 — appears to have died, aid agencies say.
Following claims that the Nigerian army has driven the terrorist group Boko Haram out of the area, it has been revealed that about two million people have been displaced. Many are living in more than 100 refugee camps.
“There are almost always small children buzzing around the camps,” Dr. Joanne Liu, the agency’s president, and Dr. Natalie Roberts, an emergency operations manager, wrote then.
“ We saw only older brothers and sisters. No toddlers straddling their big sisters’ hips, no babies strapped to their mothers’ backs.”
Children there now suffer severe measles, diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria. It seems like the government is doing little or nothing to help those in need as millions said to have been spent are not reflected or felt by those who need it.
Explaining the state of things, it has been revealed that Doctors Without Borders — widely known by its French name, Médecins Sans Frontières, or M.S.F. — normally provides only medical care, Dr. Roberts said. But the organization had been forced to distribute millet and palm oil, along with packets of peanut paste, because so many of the people it served were starving.
“Bureaucratic obstruction” by the government kept agencies like the World Food Program out for months, she said. “It’s an embarrassment to a big state like Nigeria to admit it has malnutrition,” Dr. Roberts added. “They don’t particularly enjoy outside interference.”
The situation grew so bad that M.S.F. had to change some of its protocols, she said. Instead of measuring the height and weight of malnourished children before admitting them to feeding centers, doctors started using just arm-circumference measurements to speed up the process.
And in remote villages where M.S.F. delivers food, staff members had to leave more than normal, she said. Usually, only a few days’ worth is given to families, because of the risk that large amounts will be stolen by any armed group nearby.
But because some roads are so dangerous that food can only move with army escorts or by helicopter, and because Boko Haram may send suicide bombers into any large gathering, M.S.F. does more unannounced “one shot” deliveries for safety’s sake, hoping the food will remain in the intended hands.
