European aid officials have lashed out at the UN’s handling of the humanitarian crisis in north-east Nigeria as a growing number of agencies warn of an impending famine there.
UN agencies are scaling up operations in the region, the poorest in Nigeria, where Boko Haram militants have waged a relentless seven-year insurgency. Today they will begin a push to raise $1.2bn towards relief – nearly twice that which they sought this year. But officials from donor countries have become increasingly critical of the UN’s slow, chaotic and inadequate response.
“Given the severity of the situation, we continue to be concerned that some of the UN agencies have not been able to demonstrate the capacity to deliver at scale,” wrote James Wharton, minister at the UK’s international development department (Dfid), and Monique Pariat, director-general of Echo, the EU’s humanitarian arm, to UN aid agencies.
The scale of suffering in the region, particularly the number of children at risk of dying from starvation, makes it among the world’s most severe emergencies. Yet attention and funding has gone elsewhere, including South Sudan and efforts to tackle the refugee crisis sparked by Syria’s civil war.
Save the Children, the UK-based relief agency, warned that more than 75,000 Nigerian children could die of famine and disease in the region in the coming year, figures backed by the UN children’s fund. The charity is comparing the situation to that in Somalia six years ago, when about 250,000 died in a famine, about half of them children.
The UN says that in the four nations affected by the Boko Haram insurgency, Nigeria and neighbouring Chad, Cameroon and Niger, a total of 11m need aid.
“There has been a serious failure to help the people of Borno state in Nigeria,” said Andre Heller Perache of aid group Médecins Sans Frontières. “Donors, non-governmental organisations and UN agencies, particularly the World Food Programme, have to focus on food security to avoid an even greater humanitarian disaster.”
The Dfid and Echo letter raises concern about high staff turnover in UN leadership positions, the absence of clear plans to replace senior officials and the deployment of personnel without relevant experience. Even in areas where access for the UN and aid groups is not limited by security concerns, the letter said, “scaled-up delivery has been inadequate and emergency conditions prevail”.
Sory Ouane, country director for the WFP, said the agency, which began working there in March, is stepping up its presence and resources. The UN will soon have access to a third helicopter so staff can visit areas of Borno not accessible by road due to insecurity, he added.
A senior western donor official said: “It took the UN two years to understand the magnitude of this crisis and now finally, they have a large team in the country, but they still haven’t started distribution of food on a large scale.
Contrary to the fears by the Federal Government and some international agencies that pressure on Nigerian grains from West African neighbours could trigger famine in 2017, farmers say Nigerians will not go hungry in 2017 for lack of food to buy.
Farmers who spoke with BusinessDay hinged their belief that there will be no famine in 2017 on the fact that more farmers are going into all-year cultivation, as well as the fact that many more Nigerians are going into farming now, as agriculture has become attractive and receives a lot of support from government, private sector and international organisations.
They further observe that some of the external grain purchase pressure will be taken off Nigeria by Mali, which has recently recorded a bumper harvest of grains. Mali has produced a record grain crop of 8.96 million tonnes for the 2016/17 season, an increase of 11 percent that will leave it with a surplus over 3.77 million tonnes, provisional agriculture ministry statistics showed on Wednesday.
Rice, maize and millet account for the bulk of the West African nation’s grain production.
“Despite exporters buying up grains in large quantities this year, I do not see the country experiencing famine next year. There was bumper harvest in major crops even grains this year and the figures from third quarter GDP attest to that,” said Emmanuel Ijewere, chief executive officer, Bests Foods Limited and co-ordinator, Nigeria Agribusiness Group (NABG).
FT
