North-east Nigeria: A massive internal displacement crisis

A photo essay on the conflict- and disaster-induced displacement crisis unfolding in Nigeria.

An IDP camp housing 22,000 people in a space built for 10,000. One school. Twelve classrooms. 

Too many figures can detract from a story, but sometimes one figure is the story.

It is the story of a severe humanitarian and developmental crisis. Of bursting IDP camps, malnourished children, unemployed women, dead or absent fathers.

It is the story of Teachers Village camp in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State, North East Nigeria.

A regional problem: Borno State

Boko Haram and other so-called non-state armed groups have taken tens of thousands of lives – the Council on Foreign Relations estimates some 65,000 – and forced over 2 million people to leave their homes.

Borno is a state no longer known by its traditional nickname "The Home of Peace". It has been racked by violence and conflict since 2009. 

Some have fled to Niger, Chad and Cameroon, but the vast majority remain in Borno State. They are concentrated in its capital Maiduguri, whose population has doubled to 3 million in the last few years.

The UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, OCHA, cites 7.1 million people in need of humanitarian assistance in Borno, Adamawa and Yobe states.

Half of all the schools in Borno State have been destroyed or forced to close, and an already-weak health system has buckled even further, leaving millions of people without access to healthcare.

At least 600,000 people are still living in congested camps and informal settlements.

The government and the international community debate the numbers of people in need of assistance elsewhere in Borno State, who are currently beyond their reach. Numbers range massively from 450,000 to 1.2 million.

Those "inaccessible" eke out a precarious existence in the extremities of a state that borders on the fast-expanding wasteland shores of Lake Chad – which shrinks in opportunity and stability as it shrinks in size – and the instability of northern Cameroon and southern Niger.  

Houses destroyed by Boko Haram in Garaha, Adamawa State (Photo: UNHCR).

The conflict is characterised by armed violence, suicide attacks, abductions and sexual violence. On top of the dead, thousands more have gone missing, including from their homes, schools and from displacement camps to which they had fled for protection.  

"When we escaped, we ran, without taking our belongings."

“When we escaped, we ran, without taking our belongings”, a woman told me. “Some of us ran barefoot. Some women lost their children – they have seen a lot.”

A city problem: Maiduguri, the epicentre and place of refuge

I visited some of the IDP camps in and around Maiduguri in early November 2019. 

If these camps are, as I am told, better places than the unofficial IDP settlements scattered across the north-east, then the challenge Nigeria faces is indeed huge. 

Video: A displacement disaster: the situation in Nigeria, November 2019

There are 32 official, Government-run camps for Internally Displaced Persons in Borno. 16 – like Teachers Village and Bakassi – are in and around Maiduguri, and 16 are in local government areas around the state. 

In Maiduguri and beyond, there are also an estimated 200 or so unofficial settlements like Shuwari 5, in which international NGOs like the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) provide what support they can.

Children on the street in Maiduguri IDP camp

A street in Teachers Village IDP camp, Maiduguri (Photo: IDMC).

"School? There is no school here."

"School? There is no school here," says the male leader of the Shuwari settlement. "What you see here is the daily reality: children are just running around. They are hungry, they are bored." 

I felt an overwhelming sadness at the thought of a lost generation. 

"Our number one need is food", he says. "We received 30 bags of rice to share among ourselves in March, but have had nothing since."

Twice, he says, they have been threatened with eviction from their land plots over the building of emergency shelters and latrines, until organisations like the NRC helped to negotiate on their behalf.

"Last week, a baby boy was taken sick with diarrhoea in the morning, and died at lunchtime. It was a case of malnutrition", says the female leader of the settlement. She explains how children suck garri [Cassava flour grains] to drink. 

Video: The leader of the female community describes the situation at Shurawi 5 "unofficial" IDP camp, Maiduguri.

I wander the tight rows of makeshift tents, shreds of tattered tarpaulin providing scant privacy. A woman welcomes me into her space, proud of its tidiness. I wonder how she sleeps at night, with so many children beside her, sharing barely four square-metres.

The living space in many of the camps is just half a square metre per person, an eighth of the space recommended for European prison cells.

"SPHERE humanitarian standards don’t apply anywhere here," I am told.

80% of the people living in Nigeria's IDP camps are women and children (Photo: IDMC).

And where are all the men?

I hear that they have been killed; they have travelled further into or outside Nigeria to search for work; or they have left in shame, unable to cope with the responsibility.

And if what I am witnessing here is the best-case scenario, what happens when the rainy season comes, and the camps get submerged? 

"In north-east Nigeria today," says NRC Country Director Eric Batonon, "at least 19 displacement sites are located in areas that face a high risk of flooding. Few camps have anything like proper drainage. All the camps have too few latrines, and some have none at all. Sickness spreads – through faeces, fluids, fingers, flies and food. There were 10,000 cases of cholera last year."

Sangaya camp, Dikwa (Photo: Norwegian Refugee Council).

"There is no place to sit when it rains, and no place to lie down. They call it ‘water stuck’ – people become imprisoned by the mud beneath their feet."

A nationwide problem: the scale of internal displacement in Nigeria

During 2018, the  Global Report on Internal Displacement (GRID)  showed Nigeria with the fifth highest number of new conflict-related IDPs in the world (some 541,000 of them, behind only Ethiopia, the DRC, Syria and Somalia).

Nigeria also saw the sixth highest number of new disaster-related IDPs in the world (613,000 of them, behind only the Philippines, China, India, the United States, and Indonesia). 34 of the country’s 36 states were affected by flooding in 2018, as both the Niger and Benue rivers burst their banks. 

The figures in 2019 are every bit as bad.  IDMC’s latest mid-year report  put the total number of new displacements in Nigeria in the first half of the year at 140,000 for conflict. And because the rainy season lasted longer in 2019 than in previous years, we also expect the number of flood displacements for the second half of the year to be high. 

Since January 2019 alone, a further 42,000 were forced to flee conflict and their homes in the north-east states of Adamawa, Borno, Gombe and Yobe.

New violence and conflict have now also erupted in Nigeria’s north-west, with 73,000 people uprooted in the states of Sokoto, Zamfara and Katsina between January and June. The fear is that the north-west could quickly become the new north-east. 

Add to that at least 23,000 people forced from their homes in the ongoing conflict between pastoralists and farmers in Taraba and Benue states in Nigeria’s "Middle Belt", and the country becomes a test case for Africa and for the world as to how to tackle such complex, multi-layered crises. 

A group of IDPs catch brief respite in the shade

(Photo: IDMC)

The Government and the international community alike know that the task ahead is huge. Humanitarian needs are as immense as they are pressing. With every day that passes, they become more urgent and more complex, and they jeopardise the country’s long-term prospects for stability and development.

"We are failing the 2 million people displaced by violence in north east Nigeria",  tweets  Jan Egeland, NRC’s Secretary-General. "The camps are overcrowded, the conditions are appalling, access to those in need beyond the camps is limited, and civilians are still being attacked. A precondition for moving to durable solutions is to realise the crisis for what it is."

A reinforced Government-led approach

Mariam Masha, Senior Special Assistant to Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari on Humanitarian Interventions, charts the story of the Government’s response since the start of the crisis. She recalls what was probably a lack of appreciation of the nature of the problem, and an initial delay in responding to what was to become a brutal terrorist movement.

She recollects a series of first State and then Federal mechanisms, and different incarnations of bodies set up to address the crisis – from Presidential Initiatives and Committees, to an Inter-Ministerial Taskforce and a new North East Development Commission, all working in tandem with the State and National Emergency Management Agencies, SEMA and NEMA.

"There has perhaps been a sense of internal displacement as the orphan all feeling responsible, but none quite knowing how to touch it."

"There has perhaps been a sense of internal displacement as the orphan", says Mariam Masha. "All feeling responsible, but none quite knowing how to touch it."

Two boys at Teachers Village IDP camp

(Photo: IDMC)

International agencies say the same. They rightly point to their achievements – with life-saving assistance reaching 3.8 million people this year alone – but also to the visible fragmentation in their own collective response.

Both government and internationals stress the obvious: they are trying to solve a massive social, economic and political problem, in a combustive counter terrorism environment.

38 UN and NGO workers have been killed since 2011. Ten have died in the last 18 months, and 6 more are still missing.

A new ministry

But 2019 has seen widely welcomed moves by the Government to address the situation once and for all.

May of this year saw President Buhari establish a new Ministry for Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development led by Sadiya Umar Farouq, the previous head of the National Commission for Refugees, Migrants and IDPs. 

Elevating the challenge to the Ministerial level, with a clear connection between humanitarian and development support, is an important and symbolic step forward. 

Minister Farouq, speaking at a workshop on civil-security cooperation in humanitarian interventions in Maiduguri on 6 November.

Sadiya Umar Farouq, Minister for Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development (Photo: IDMC).

Minister Farouq, speaking at a workshop on civil-security cooperation in humanitarian interventions in Maiduguri on 6 November, squared up to the way that civil and security players can both reinforce and undermine each other in violent situations. For all that, she said, nothing can replace complementarity and sustainability in the face of harrowing humanitarian needs: millions of people depend on this.

Video: A woman at Shurawi 5 "unofficial" IDP camp tells some of her story.

A desire to return

In early 2019, over 90% of those living in displacement camps said they wanted to go home when conditions were favourable – when the areas they fled from were physically secured, when people could move without restrictions, and when basic services were restored.

"Here, we have no animals to rear … and no access to farm lands. What we had has been reduced to nothing.”

“If our community becomes safe and if peace returns, we will go back”, I heard at Shuwari 5, “because we are farmers, and farming is our major source of income. Here, we have no animals to rear … and no access to farm lands. What we had has been reduced to nothing.”

Last year,  IDMC analysis  of IOM data showed that a total of 225,000 people returned to their areas of origin, but that they continued to face high insecurity. We call these "partial", not "durable", returns. Another 86,000 returned to damaged or destroyed houses.

Map depicting returnees in north-eastern Nigeria.

Returnees in north-eastern Nigeria (Source: IOM). Disclaimer: The depiction and use of boundaries, geographic names, and related data shown on maps are not guaranteed to be error free nor do they imply judgment on the legal status of any territory, or any endorsement or acceptance of such boundaries.

Can Nigeria marshal the resources – financial and political, national and international – to make these returns sustainable, and offer its IDPs the solutions they so desperately need?

Two small girls, carrying water canisters at Teachers Village IDP camp.

(Photo: IDMC)

Three priorities going forward

However difficult the process is, three things are clear to me. First, is the importance of data.

Good data means good decisions. There is good data available in Nigeria, much of it the result of a joint effort by many government and international agencies operating in the country. But the data needs to be harmonised, and the gaps need to be filled.

"We need to centralise all the data and all the tools", says Ya Baula Kolo, the Executive Chairman of SEMA. "Our capacity, knowledge and methodology can improve", says Mustapha Maihaja, Director General of NEMA. "And for this, we need all the support we can get from our partners". 

Better data can allow us not just to track IDP movements, but also to understand better the circumstances under which people are moving, and the conditions they are moving to – including how these conditions may shift, as the political context evolves.

This helps to ensure that the right kind of support is being provided, and that returns are not just leading to secondary displacement.

Together, we must strive for better data on the different needs of various population groups – women, children, the disabled, the elderly – so that we can prioritise humanitarian and development investments and provide better security, shelter, health, education.

Internally displaced person Samuel repairing mobile phones in Old Maiduguri

IDP Samuel repairing mobile phones in Old Maiduguri (Photo: Micah Mendie).

Second, is the need for comprehensive and integrated policy frameworks that can guide new approaches to internal displacement – from prevention to development, whether in conflict or disaster settings.

Nigeria’s national IDP policy has been several years in the making. It now needs to be adopted. Nigeria can learn from the experiences of other countries, from as far afield as Colombia, or from as near as Niger. 

And third, of course, is the need for sustainable funding and for sustained and collective action

Where there are children, there is hope

What I merely glimpsed in Maiduguri is what millions live with on a daily basis.

My mind goes back to Bakassi camp, and the swarm of children around us seeking our attention, reaching out for our hands.

Where there are children, there must always be hope. Driving away from the camp, I took a photo of a group of children screeching with excitement, and a boy doing a magnificent cartwheel. 

I hope a massive act of collective will, and sustained support, will turn this situation round, and keep him cartwheeling.