Minister: 8 million people need help in Northeast
Twenty six million people across the Northern states were affected by the Boko Haram crises, 14 million of who are in the North East and eight and a half million out of these need immediate relief, Minister of State for Budget and National Planning, Hajiya Zainab Ahmed said yesterday. She said this figure is bigger than the number of people affected by the crises in Syria but it has not gotten the same measure of response internationally. She spoke at Daily Trust’s corporate headquarters where she paid a visit.
The minister said the situation in the three North Eastern states of Borno, Yobe and Adamawa has graduated from being a security problem to a humanitarian crisis. She said even though many local and international organisations rushed in to help, the Presidency got a report last October that coordination of the aid effort was poor so it set up an inter-ministerial committee headed by the Budget and National Planning Ministry to ensure better coordination. Different ministries and agencies however continue to control different aspects of the relief effort, she said.
She said last year, international relief partners produced a Humanitarian Response Plan which puts the region’s needs at $84 million. This year, she said Nigeria led the way to prepare the 2017 plan and established the Emergency Coordination Centre which provides real time information to government agencies and development partners. The plan, she said, identified 8.5 million people as being in need of assistance and the international partners committed to taking care of 6.9 million of them in Borno, Yobe and Adamawa states.
Mrs Ahmed said when Nigeria presented its response plan in Geneva, the international donor agencies noted that there is something unique about Nigeria because only 10% of Internally Displaced Persons [IDPs] live in camps. The remaining 90% of IDPs live with relatives and friends in the communities. The people supporting them themselves need urgent help because they have so little, she said. She said the security crisis in the North East prevented millions of people from engaging in farming for many years, yet they share the little that they have with IDPs.