Since the closure by the authorities of a dozen camps for displaced people in northeastern Nigeria, the other camps have found themselves overwhelmed. Aisha Usman is finding it increasingly difficult to feed her family. She, her husband and their nine children have already been struggling for eight years in the informal El-Miskin camp, which has around 7,200 displaced people, in Maiduguri, the regional capital of Borno State. “They crowded us into one place. We are sitting under trees doing nothing. It’s like we’re in jail,” she said.
However, for Aisha, there is no question of returning to Gradaï, her village, located 200 km away. In 2014, Boko Haram jihadists attacked his house. His neighbors are killed before his eyes. One of his children is kidnapped. She never saw him again. “I’m afraid they’ll come back and kill us if I go back home,” she says. There is hunger there. They are still in the bush, our lives will still be in danger. »
In northeastern Nigeria, a bloody conflict has raged for fourteen years between the army and jihadist groups, including Boko Haram. It killed more than 40,000 people and displaced more than 2 million people, creating one of the most serious humanitarian crises of the 21st century. So, like Aisha, more than a hundred thousand in recent years have found refuge in Maiduguri on a site protected by trenches and guarded by the army.
Food insecurity
Most of them resided in the camps run by the authorities, who closed them a year ago, claiming to have secured the countryside. Since then, El-Miskin and the other informal camps have been overflowing. And the situation only got worse. Today, Aisha is forced to beg and send her children to sell water to feed her siblings, as food aid is becoming increasingly scarce.
Displaced people evacuated from Maiduguri have also joined the ranks of other official camps in the region. As in Bama, 70 km to the southeast. The city is suffocating under the flood of new arrivals from Maiduguri and the countryside where the insurgency is raging. The official GSSS displacement camp, built for 25,000 people, now hosts 100,000, according to the UN.
“Food insecurity, which was already significant, has worsened with the closure of official camps in Maiduguri,” warns Ibrahim Mohamed Kari, a doctor at a center for malnourished children in Bama. About 4.4 million people face food insecurity in the northeast, according to the UN. So many inhabitants venture outside the city every day and cross the trenches dug all around to go and collect wood or collect metals in order to resell them.
There is “a lack of agricultural land outside the garrison town and the flow of people fleeing the surrounding villages, controlled by the insurgents, is important”, lists Ibrahim Mohamed Kari.
Despite this constant influx, the leaders of Borno State intend to close all camps in the region by 2026, hoping to end the dependency on humanitarian aid and encourage the displaced to return to work in the fields. No one is forced to return, insist the authorities, who offer a small financial aid to those who do. To reassure the population, Governor Babagana Zulum, recently returned to power for a second term, is promoting a return to calm in the region.
“Sleeping” conflict
The new Nigerian President, Bola Tinubu, has said he wants to make the fight against insecurity his priority. The attacks are fewer than a few years ago, but the jihadists remain active in the region, in particular those of the Islamic State in West Africa (Iswap), a group that has become dominant since the death in 2021 of the leader of Boko Haram, Abubakar Shekau.
In mid-June, eleven farmers were killed in a village about fifteen kilometers from Maiduguri, on the road to Damboa. “The road between Maiduguri and Damboa is very dangerous because there can be many ambushes,” says Brigadier General Omopariola, which even hinders the arrival of humanitarian aid. Jihadists are entrenched nearby, on the edge of the Sambisa forest. For him, “the conflict is not over, it is dormant”.
This worries NGOs all the more: “When the camps close, how can we be sure that the place where the displaced will be taken will be safe? asks Genesis Abamini, one of the leaders of the Damboa camp, where nearly 30,000 displaced people are crammed. “If the areas from which they come were safe, they would not hesitate to stay and continue to cultivate their fields,” he protested.