The United Nations has disclosed that at least two million people are still trapped in areas in Borno State controlled by Boko Haram
UNICEF’s Chief of Nutrition in Nigeria, Arjan de Wagt, who made this disclosure on Friday in Geneva, Switzerland, during a press briefing by the UN Information Service, added that these numbers still trapped by Boko Haram are facing serious humanitarian conditions.
This comes against a backdrop of several claims by Nigeria’s military, and government, that the Boko Haram sect has no territories under its control within the country, as they have been put on the run by the military’s renewed campaigns.
The insurgents had only last week released a video showing a large number of people both adult male and children observing Eid El-Kabir prayers, suggesting the group still has some town under its control, contrary to the claim by Nigerian government to have defeated Boko Haram.
Defence Headquarters (DHQ) however said the video was a photoshop (faked).
But Mr Wagt, who reportedly spoke on telephone from Abuja, stated that at least two million in Borno State alone cannot receive aid owing to the security situation in their areas.
He also revealed that only the town of Bama and the Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) camp in the town, but not the other parts of the town are accessible. Bama is also a town in Borno State.
Mr Wagt, disclosed that the condition of the people trapped in Boko Haram-held areas was unknown but that UNICEF only managed to get hint of what is happening in those areas when IDPs from those places came to more accessible areas.
He said it is only then, UNICEF could check their nutrition and health condition, which was bad.
Read also: Boko Haram vows to capture President Buhari in new video (Watch)
He said, “Before April 2016, there was no access to most areas in Borno State because of the security situation. But since April, access has progressively become possible to some of the other areas.
“In the newly-accessible areas, the levels of suffering and of malnutrition are very high. In some of those areas, there’s a severe acute malnutrition rate of 12 per cent, which is a level rarely seen. It is of a severity similar to that seen during the Horn of Africa crisis in 2011, in Somalia.”
Raising alarm over looming humanitarian disaster in the affected North East states and describing it as worst level of malnutrition possible, he said that in Borno, Adamawa and Yobe states, have about 400,000 children “with severe acute malnutrition”, with Borno alone having 244,000 children of the total.
Mr Wagt alerted that the children are on the brink of death. According to him, about one in five of those children were likely to die if they were not reached in time with specialised therapeutic foods.
He said, “If nothing was done, about 49,000 of the 244,000 children suffering from severe acute malnutrition in Borno State would die over the coming 12 months, translating to about 134 every day. Some 65,000 people are in famine-like conditions, the worst level of food insecurity, and facing starving to death for lack of food. It is a very unique situation in the world.”
By Ebere Ndukwu …
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