Politics
Bauchi govt debunks report of intense hunger in IDP camps
Bauchi State Government has rebuffed reports claiming Internally Displaced Persons are feeding on onion leafs to survive in one of the IDP camps in the state.
While addressing newsmen in Bauchi on Monday, the Director Relief and Rehabilitation for the State Emergency Management Agency, SEMA, Kabiru Yusuf Kobi, said there were no more IDPs in the state.
An online medium in Bauchi had on 21st April, 2019 published a report captioned: “Hunger compels children in Bauchi IDP camp feed on onion leaves.
The report claimed that there was intense hunger as a result of inadequacy of food items in an Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp in the outskirts of Bauchi, which has forced adolescent children to feed on onion leaves for survival.
Kobi in response explained that all IDPs were initially relocated to host communities since the era of insurgency. He mentioned one of the host communities as Runde -bin.
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He said the insurgency which spread to Borno State has emigrated most people from their ancestral homes. As a result, Bauchi state has had to deal with 2,000 unregistered IDP camps.
According to him, the IDPs who were majorly from Maiduguri were hired by the wife of a former head of state Maryam Abacha to work on her farmlands in Bauchi before they decided to make it a dwelling place.
Kabiru said though, the Government is in the process of helping them, there have been several intervention from Non-Governmental organizations to help the so-called IDPs. He listed one of the organization as the Presidential Committee on North East Initiatives (PCNI) which has donated several relief materials.
“We read a report that IDPs eat onion leaves in Bauchi. That’s not true, they don’t eat onion leaves. First, we don’t have an IDP camp in Bauchi. When they came to our state, we told them that we couldn’t camp them because we didn’t have the resources to accommodate them. But they chose to stay and farm.
“They called and got a large piece of land from Mariam Abacha, who happens to be their sister, and they have been farming there since last year. They are not our responsibility, but because we are humans, we are looking at how to integrate them into our communities,” he said.
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