Inside Nigeria’s heartbreaking IDP problem

Statistics regarding Internally Displaced Persons, the lives they live and the camps they inhabit are indicators of the massive humanitarian headache plaguing Nigeria at the moment. Just how bad is it? Daily Trust reports.

Hannah Mustafa was a primary six pupil of the community school in her village, Lassa, in Borno State. The Boko Haram insurgency made her leave her father’s house. “We were on the farm when the insurgents came on motor bikes and began shooting at us. We were lucky to have escaped alive,” she said.
“I had witnessed them kill my father already,” she added, seemingly matter-of-factly, but not without sadness in her eyes which dropped as she said the words, as if recapturing the scene in her thirteen year-old mind. “For seven days we were on the run, trekking from Lassa to Giraku. In all that time the only thoughts in my mind were of my mother whom I had lost sight of as we fled,” she said. “Thankfully, my mother and I were reunited here at the camp. The rest of my siblings, we heard, are scattered around Lagos and Abuja.”
Mustafa and her mother had stayed at the NYSC/Damarre IDP Camp in Jimeta-Yola for five months as at the time our reporter visited.
Alhaji Gana Boni was resident in Gwoza, Borno State. He had been at the NYSC/Damarre Camp for seven months when he spoke to Daily Trust Saturday about his ordeal. He said: “On August 5th, 2014 I was in front of my house at about 4.30pm when I heard a crowd of young men coming with motorcycles. They began shooting guns, throwing bombs… things we had never seen or experienced before. We were living in ‘parliament’ in front of my house with my friends and colleagues. Someone said, ‘these are the people they call Boko Haram.’
“Confusion broke and we all began running, everybody finding his way to his house. By this the time we got to our houses we locked ourselves in doors till morning passing an uneasy night. At 7 am, they came en masse and began operations, house by house. The moment they see a male, they don’t interview or question him. They simply kill him off. As long as you are up to the age of fifteen, you are killed. We thought that this would end by the second or third day but it continued. I hid in the ceiling of my house for seven days.”
Boni got out of the ceiling at midnight of August 12 and began running and trekking the 26 kilometre stretch from Gwoza to Madagali for about six hours, reaching Madagali at 6.15am. “I spent only two hours there and decided to advance because Madagali was also not safe. I continued my journey on to Yola, by car. I pitched tent with other refugees at Jamb Block Market.”
It was from there he was taken by Good Samaritans to Bye pass, Dubeli Primary School where he and the other IDPs spent two days there before State Emergency Management Agency and Red Cross took them to the IDP camp. “I’m one of the first who occupied this camp on the 24th of August. Others began coming over the months,” he informed.
A NEMA official told Daily Trust Saturday that there were 24 official camps in Nigeria: 15 in Maiduguri, seven in Yola, 2 in Yobe with one being a collection point for IDPs living away from the camps with friends or family. Admitting that there were unofficial camps around the country, the source couldn’t establish how many there were.
Since the Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria began in 2008 and killings followed in 2009, there has been a surge of IDPs on a weekly, if not daily basis. They are forced to relocate to other parts with only the shirts on their backs in most of the cases. Some to their relatives and friends, others to government setup camps, yet some others have found refuge on empty patches of land which they now call home.
In July 2014, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) set up a Displacement Tracking Matrix (DTM) to support the government in collecting and disseminating data on IDPs. As of April 2015, DTM assessments identified 1,491,706 IDPs in Adamawa, Bauchi, Borno, Gombe, Taraba and Yobe states. This was published in the ‘Displacement Tracking Matrix | DTM Round II Report.’
The report stated: “While most were displaced in 2014, up to a third fled violence in the first four months of 2015 alone. The National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) recorded an additional 47,276 IDPs in Plateau, Nasarawa, Abuja (Federal Capital Territory), Kano and Kaduna in February. This would bring the total number of registered IDPs to 1,538,982 in these northern states and parts of the Middle Belt.”
An analysis carried out by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) posted on their also website states that as of April 2015, IDMC estimated that 1,538,982 people forced to flee their homes in Nigeria were still living in internal displacement.
According to the document: “This figure includes people displaced as a result of brutal attacks by the Islamist armed group Boko Haram in north-eastern Nigeria, the government-led counterinsurgency operations against the group, ongoing inter-communal clashes and natural hazard-induced disasters.”
The organisation which is part of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) was established in 1998 at the request of the Interagency Standing Committee on humanitarian assistance, explains that: “the increase in the first half of 2015 of the number of internally displaced people (IDPs) in Nigeria was due to ongoing violence in the north-east as well as the return of refugees who have not been able to settle back in their places of origin and are therefore considered as IDPs.
“The biggest rise in the number of IDPs was registered in Borno state, one of the three north-eastern states most affected by Boko Haram violence, followed by Adamawa and Yobe,” it informed.
Highlighting some of the limitations with data collection regarding IDPs, the IDMC laments that internal displacement figures in Nigeria have had various limitations and issues of reliability.  
According to the IDMC, different government agencies use different approaches to gathering figures.  It said: “Prior to the setup of IOM’s DTM in support of the government, the only total figure available was that of the National Commission for Refugees, which put the total number of IDPs at 3.3 million at the end of 2013. Thus the significant drop in the total figure is due not to changes of the situation on the ground, but to changes in how data is collected.”
There is also very limited information on IDPs, needs in many parts of the country, particularly communities living in protracted displacement in urban centres due to flooding and evictions, those affected by ethnic, religious, and political conflicts in Nigeria’s Middle Belt region. The continuing shortage of accurate and reliable data on internal displacement across Nigeria has resulted in a distorted picture of displacement and assistance needs in Nigeria and an alarming lack of understanding of the country’s displacement dynamics by national actors and the international community.
In a press conference last Thursday, as preamble to the United Nations International Refugee Day, Hadiza Sani Kangiwa, Federal Commissioner of the National Commission for Refugees said there were 200, 000 Nigerian refugees in Chad, Cameroun and Niger. Kangiwa said an estimated 1.5 million people are currently displaced from their homes following the insurgency in the North East part of the country.
Speaking to Daily Trust Saturday, she said the Commission is not an advocate of IDP camps because IDPs should ordinarily not stay longer than three months in any camp. It is for this reason that the Commission developed the ‘Standard Assistance Package Approach’ which encourages IDPs to move out of the camps, which they are waiting for the Federal Executive Council to give accent to make it a policy.
She said: “This will take care of rent, one month’s food supply, one year health insurance, one-off cash payment, non-food items, referral either to school, counselling or economic empowerment training,” she stressed, adding that there was need to sensitize people to empty the camps.
“With N1 billion 200 families could be settled and moved out of camps rather than that be expended on them while being in the camps,” Kangiwa added. On how much funding is needed to cater for the IDPs, she said it is impossible to say.
On what NCFR has specifically done for IDPs in 2015 Kangiwa said: “There is a settlement constructed in 2014 for IDPs who ran from the North-East to Kebbi State. About 26 houses were built for about 200 IDPs.” She added that work is ongoing with the UNHCR for refugees in Niger to get students registered to go back to school and sit for their necessary exams. This is in addition to the community service centre set up in Abuja where IDP children can be referred to for school.
UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) Representative to Nigeria and ECOWAS, Ms Angele Dikongue-Atangana said the magnitude of displacements witnessed on the field is enormous and the UNHCR supports the Nigerian government in alleviating the sufferings of IDPs which they do most in capacity building.
With so much done, IDPs like those resident in Kuchigoro, in the FCT, said in as much as assistance comes in every now and again, they would like more concrete help come their way. Philemon Emmanuel, chairman of the camp, fled from Gwoza in January 2014, said the settlement is not a government camp, but he and other IDPs began occupying the then empty piece of land when they had nowhere else to go. He has lived there for one year and six months now.
Emmanuel said: “Many like me came here because we had relatives leaving around here. That’s how our people began fleeing here. There are a few also from Adamawa.  Seventy three were killed in our village as some of them ran away to the mountains to hide. They then escaped into Cameroun after trekking twelve days. Getting to Cameroun we boarded vehicles to Yola for N15,000. Some, from there went to Maiduguri, others to Plateau and the rest are here.”
Emmanuel added that he personally witnessed one attack which happened in Konduga. “I saw [the insurgents] shoot someone dead. I saw their corpses,” he said, still disturbed by the goriness of his memory. Survival was not on his mind. Happy that his family is now with him, he still worries about his mother who is still back home with her younger brother who is a Muslim while she is a Christian.
Emmanuel is happy to be at the IDP camp earning N35,000 monthly as truck driver in a construction company than to hurry home to his farm where he earned N23,000 from selling beans. His wife has had a fifth baby while on the camp.
In as much as the NCFR boss advocates that IDPs should live the camps, some like Emmanuel are not in a hurry to do so. “We all want to go home, but all our houses and property were burnt and Boko Haram is still there. There’s nothing like going back now unless government assures us and we see that it is indeed safe for us to go back,” he stressed.