Nigerians in the northeastern state of Borno were already struggling to feed their families due to relentlessly rising prices and a brutal insurgency. When a dam collapsed in September, flooding the state capital and surrounding farmland, many people found themselves running out of options.
Today, they queue for aid in camps for people displaced by fighting between extremist Boko Haram rebels and the army. When they run out of money, they seek work on local farms, where they risk being killed or raped by local bandits.
“I can’t even cry anymore. I’m too tired,” said Indo Usman, who tried to start over in Maiduguri, the state capital, by raising animals for the two annual Muslim holy days, after years of repeatedly fleeing rebel attacks in rural Borno.
The flood washed away all that, driving her, her husband and their six children to a bare room in Gubio, an unfinished housing project about 96 km northwest of Maiduguri, which has become a camp for displaced people.
Torrential rains and floods that hit 29 of Nigeria’s 36 states this year have destroyed more than 1.5 million hectares of cultivated land, affecting more than nine million people, according to the United Nations. Food and Agriculture (FAO).
Climate change is a factor, as is Nigeria’s poorly maintained or non-existent infrastructure, as well as vulnerabilities caused by the weakening currency, the naira, and the removal of a government fuel subsidy.
The cost of basic foodstuffs like rice and beans has doubled, tripled or even quadrupled in one year, depending on location, representing an unmanageable shock for millions of poor families.
Mass kidnappings for ransom in the northwest and conflicts between farmers and herders in the central belt, traditionally the country’s breadbasket, have also disrupted agriculture and reduced food supplies.
THE HUNGER OF THE HUNGRY
According to World Bank estimates, about 40 percent of Nigeria’s 200 million people live below the international poverty line, which is $2.15 per person per day.
According to a joint analysis by the government and UN agencies, 25 million people already live in acute food and nutrition insecurity, putting their lives or livelihoods at immediate risk. This number is expected to increase to 33 million by next June-August.
“The food crisis in Nigeria is huge, because we are seeing a crisis within a crisis within a crisis,” Trust Mlambo, northeast program manager at the World Food Program, said in an interview with Reuters in Maiduguri .
With international donors focusing on emergencies in Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan, Mr Mlambo said there were not enough funds to fully meet Nigeria’s growing food aid needs.
“We really prioritize the hungriest of the hungry,” he said.
In Borno, the Alau Dam, upstream of Maiduguri, failed on September 9, four days after state authorities told the public it was safe. However, residents and engineers in the region had warned that it was under tension.
Hundreds of people were killed in the ensuing floods, according to aid workers who did not wish to be identified for fear of offending the state government. A state government spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.
Zainab Abubakar, a self-employed seamstress in the city who lived in relative comfort with her husband and six children in a house equipped with a refrigerator, was awakened at midnight by water rushing into her room.
They ran for their lives as the flood destroyed their home and washed away everything, including her sewing machine. Today, they are hosted in Gubio and collect rice from humanitarian organizations in a plastic bucket.
“There is no other solution,” she said.
In Banki, on the Nigeria-Cameroon border, about 133 km southeast of Maiduguri, Mariam Hassan lost her crops of maize, peppers and okra during repeated flooding of her subsistence farm this year, leaving him nothing to eat or sell.
“I beg neighbors or relatives to give me food, not even for me, but for my children, so that we can survive,” said Ms. Hassan, who has eight children. “The situation made me a beggar.
