‘Boko Haram’ hunger gnaws
Kenya in ICC review
MAIDUGURI, Nigeria, Dec 13, (RTRS): When Boko Haram militants stormed Kaka Mohammed’s hometown of Bama in northeast Nigeria two years ago and kidnapped one of her sons, she escaped with her disabled daughter carried in a wheelbarrow and her other two children fleeing on foot.
Mohammed and her children, among the 1.7 million Nigerians uprooted by Boko Haram, were taken in by a family in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state, the jihadists’ former stronghold.
But both the displaced and host families are going hungry amid a deepening food crisis and the threat of imminent famine.
“As soon as there is peace I want to return home — I don’t want to live here any more,” said 30-yearold Mohammed, who lives with a woman named Zana Malambanwe and her family.
“The children are suffering, there is no food. They have been complaining bitterly,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Some 4.4 million people like Mohammed are going hungry across northeast Nigeria, and two million need food aid urgently, according to the UN World Food Programme (WFP).
Displaced
“We are living in one room. It is really not easy,” said Malambanwe, also 30, who has hosted the displaced family in her home for over a year. “If we get food, we eat together, but sometimes we only eat one meal a day, of cassava flour.”
Around 400,000 children are at risk from famine in the states of Borno, Adamawa and Yobe, 75,000 of whom could die from hunger within months, said the UN children’s agency (UNICEF).
Nigeria under the government of Muhammadu Buhari said last week that aid agencies, such as the United Nations, were exaggerating hunger levels to get more money from international donors. However, the government said in November that the country could face famine by January.
Boko Haram militants have killed about 15,000 people and displaced 2.4 million across Cameroon, Chad, Niger, and Nigeria during a seven-year campaign to create an Islamist caliphate.
Nigeria’s army has pushed the Islamist group back to its base in Sambisa forest in the past few months but the militants still stage suicide bombings. Two girl bombers killed at least three people and wounded 17 at a market on Sunday.
Almost four in five of the 1.4 million displaced Nigerians in Borno state are living in local communities, with the rest residing in temporary camps, according to the United Nations.
Yet tensions are rising in many homes as food runs short.
NAIROBI: Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta said on Monday the country will have to think seriously about its membership in the International Criminal Court (ICC), signalling another African country may quit the embattled court.
Kenyatta and his deputy William Ruto have both faced charges at the ICC over their alleged roles in the deadly inter-ethnic violence after Kenya’s 2007 elections in which about 1,200 people died. Both cases collapsed due to insufficient evidence.
His announcement put new pressure on the world’s first permanent war crimes court, which has had to fight off allegations of pursuing a neo-colonial agenda in Africa.
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BANJUL: West African heads of state began arriving in Gambia on Tuesday to try to convince the long-ruling President Yahya Jammeh to relinquish power after losing an election this month.
Jammeh, who seized power in a coup in 1994 and earned the reputation as a repressive leader, had conceded defeat to opponent Adama Barrow, prompting wild celebrations in the country of 1.8 million after the Dec 1 election.
However, he changed his mind a week later, citing irregularities in the official results, which were corrected to show a victory margin of fewer than 20,000 votes for Barrow.
Jammeh’s U-turn has prompted sharp criticism from the United States, the United Nations, regional body ECOWAS and even the African Union, which typically takes a softer line.