30th November, 2016
The former UN Deputy Humanitarian Coordinator in Nigeria, Mohamed Safieldin, said Nigerian government and the international community should sustain the return of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in Northeast.
Safieldin said the move by the IDPs to voluntarily return to communities liberated from the Boko Haram was commendable.
The UN official said there was a spontaneous return by a number of people formerly in camps, adding that the statistics of those in formal camps could reduce drastically if sustained.
“With regards to the number of IDPs in February 2016 compared with July, there was a 16 per cent drop in the population of IDPs living inside Maiduguri.
“I was travelling from Maiduguri to Monguno and I met with a number of men who were on the land close to the road trying to cultivate and prepare the land for the rainy season.
“They told me that they were in one of the camps – Bakassi camps inside Maiduguri. Many of them left their families in the camp and they moved out of the camp to cultivate the land.”
He commended the IDPs for their courage, saying that the efforts showed that they wanted to work and were not happy to remain in the camps and be fed daily.
“These people (IDPs) have dignity; these people have lived and they continued to live with their dignity; the amount of aid that they are receiving in the camps is insufficient.
“At the same time, many of them are not able to move freely in and outside the camps. So for many of them, the desire to take charge of their lives is still very strong.
“Even if they believe the areas are partially safe, they have taken the risk, leaving their families behind, going back to their villages, trying to cultivate, trying to earn a living and be self-sufficient or partially self-sufficient.
“This is the situation, we can’t say it is absolutely safe; some areas are safer than the others; but many IDPs are now taking the initiatives on their own to return to some of these places.”
According to him, however, what needs to be done by the Nigerian Government and the international humanitarian community is to make this spontaneous return sustainable.
“Where these people are returning based on their own assessment of the situation, we need to make sure that the basic services such as health, shelter and water are available.
“If this happens, then these people are likely to stay there for a longer period if not to resettle back to their home villages.
“But if people go to cultivate the land to grow some of their products and they find very little support and assistance in terms of the basic services, they are not likely to stay there.
“So their return is only going to be temporarily and we need to make it spontaneous otherwise, the IDPs camps, the IDPs presence in places like Maiduguri will continue.
“That will mean that the large portion of Borno state will be empty without any human beings living there.
“It also means that the majority of the people (IDPs) will be living in camps or in shanties kind of settings in Maiduguri and around Maiduguri,” he said.