Going home or staying safe in NE Nigeria, an impossible choice
MAIDUGURI, Nigeria: “Boko Haram was in my house!” three-year-old Aisha said with a frown, sat next to her mother Hadiza in a run-down camp for internally displaced people (IDPs) in Nigeria’s northeastern city of Maiduguri. The little girl froze with fear on seeing the jihadists last month before her mother grabbed her and ran. It wasn’t even the first time 25-year-old Hadiza fled her hometown of Dikwa to Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state. She had already escaped years ago after a Boko Haram attack, joining the more than two million people forced to flee their homes, often more than once, by Nigeria’s grinding conflict.
“I never want to go back,” said Amina, a 22-yearold woman also from Dikwa. She and Hadiza had only recently returned to the town, where they farm beans and other vegetables, after being told it was safe. But on March 2, heavily armed fighters of the jihadist group Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) overran Dikwa’s fortifications.
For little Aisha, who wears a bright pink veil, rivals ISWAP and Boko Haram are the same. Both groups kill, kidnap and rape, forcing people to live in tents far away from their homes. Many of the displaced lack access to the most basic necessities. At Yawuri, a makeshift camp outside Maiduguri home to nearly 2,000 people, “there is no food. Sometimes no food for 24 hours,” said a 50-yearold woman, Balu Modu, explaining their daily diet consists of ground millet and green leaves. Outside of Maiduguri, many more live in congested camps in areas that aid workers struggle to reach as they themselves are targeted by the insurgents.
In an effort to help people leave camps and rebuild their lives, Borno state governor Babagana Umara Zulum in 2018 initiated a policy of “voluntary return, resettlement and reintegration” of IDPs to their “homelands”. The government has already returned thousands of people and hopes to resettle “at least 50 percent of IDPs by 2022 and no IDP camps by 2026,” according to an official document seen by AFP. But many doubt whether it is safe for people to return home.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, three senior aid workers with international organizations in the country said that they did not believe appropriate conditions for returns were currently in place.
Despite security measures, insurgents have launched repeated assaults on a dozen fortified towns where people had returned. “They’re forcing people to towns they have shown they cannot protect,” said one aid worker. “It’s insane. They are literally pushing them to die.”