Lying on a small bed next to her mother, 14-month-old Aisha Usman stares blankly, her eyes sunk in their sockets and rib cage visible.
She is the latest arrival at a treatment centre for severely malnourished children in Nigeria’s North East, where a long running Islamist insurgency has uprooted millions, forcing farmers to abandon fields and causing food shortages.
According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, some 1.74 million children under the age of five face acute malnutrition in the area.
The militant Boko Haram group and its offshoot Islamic State West Africa Province have been fighting Nigerian security forces in the North East for over a decade, displacing more than 2 million people and killing hundreds of others, aid agencies say.
At the treatment centre at Damaturu Hospital, in the Yobe State capital, Aisha’s mother, Fatima said there were days when her family goes to sleep hungry because of lack of food.
That is because in her Babangida village, some 50 km from Damaturu, Islamist insurgents forced villagers to abandon their farms, she said.
She used to fetch firewood for sale but says that stopped as it became too dangerous to venture into the forest.
“Sometimes we are getting food to eat, and at times we don’t,” the 35-year-old said.
Her daughter weighs 4.7 kg (10 lb), less than half the average weight of children her age. Some of the little girl’s organs were shutting down when she arrived at the hospital, a doctor said.
She has been given an injection and started receiving food via a tube, and the doctor said she was slowly responding and improving.
The United Nations’ OCHA needs $1 billion this year to assist 5.5 million people, including women and children, with food aid in the three states of Borno, Adamawa and Yobe.
The OCHA has raised only 42% of the required funds eight months into the year, according to a briefing to reporters.
Some international donors have shifted funding elsewhere, including Ukraine, Ethiopia and Afghanistan, which are also facing increased humanitarian needs, the OCHA said.
Up to 5,000 children in Nigeria’s North East, however, are at risk of dying in the next two months if funding does not come through, said John Mukisa, a nutrition sector coordinator for U.N. agencies.
Across from Fatima’s bed, 21-year-old Sahura Hassan brought her son to the Damaturu treatment centre because he had stopped eating, had a fever, could not sit and was severely dehydrated.
“Most of the problem we notice in these local government areas is due to poor access to food due to the insecurity, and there is food insufficiency in each of the households,” Japhet Udokwu, the doctor in charge of the treatment centre said.
Lariya Abdulkareem’s family used to make a living farming beans and sorghum at a village in Nigeria’s North West Katsina State. But threats of bandit attacks forced them to abandon their land and farm elsewhere.
Today, worsening insecurity has disrupted agriculture and food supplies in the region, and the grandmother says feeding her family has become a challenge.
“We cannot access the places we did before,” Abdulkareem said, clutching her seven-month-old granddaughter in a clinic set up a year ago by health authorities with Ngo Doctors Without Borders (MSF).
Rural North West Nigeria has been ravaged by gangs of bandit militias who raid villages, loot cattle and kidnap people, holding them for ransom in camps deep in the forests that carpet the region.
Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced across the North West and central regions, and thousands killed.
The impact rivals that of a 13-year jihadist conflict in the North East of Nigeria which has claimed more than 40,000 lives.
But in the North West, the gang crime has also combined with surging prices for food and fuel, breeding a crisis that inflicts hunger on youngsters who are already exposed to malaria and other diseases, say aid workers and health officials.
MSF, one of the few international agencies to be active in the North West, said the complex crisis has fuelled a surge in severe acute malnutrition among youngsters.
In Katsina State alone, nearly 44,500 children have been admitted to nutrition programmes this year, and aid agencies and local health authorities are preparing for this to rise to 100,000 by year’s end.
Nafisa Sani, a senior Katsina health official, said the state is seeing “high” numbers of malnutrition even for a region that often struggles with child malnourishment.
The Kofar Sauri in-patient clinic in Katsina city was set up to treat 200 patients, but admits up to 350, with mothers often sharing beds in tented wards. Other health facilities see a daily flow of hundreds of mothers seeking help.
MSF’s in-patient sites in Katsina will soon expand capacity to 500 beds to attend to growing need over recent weeks, but complicated cases rose 40 percent just over the last week.
Inside tents, children under five, some on drips in emergency care, are weighed, measured and diagnosed for malnutrition, often after falling sick with other illnesses, medical staff say.
“We have measles ongoing, there is a hunger gap and with banditry we have a lot of displaced. It takes a toll on children,” said Yakubu Abubakar, a pediatrician working at one MSF Katsina city clinic.
MSF said in Gummi in neighbouring Zamfara State, its teams screened more than 36,000 children under five years old in June, following a nutrition alert.
More than half the children were malnourished. One in four was severely malnourished and in need of urgent medical care.
“The United Nations’ OCHA needs $1 billion this year to assist 5.5 million people, including women and children, with food aid in the three states of Borno, Adamawa and Yobe”
UNICEF says Nigeria ranks first in the continent and second in the world for child malnutrition. Around eight million children in the North West are undernourished, the agency said.
Fear of attacks or violence from bandit militias based in nearby Rugu forests in Katsina’s western areas near the Niger border has kept many families away from farming the land.
Just this year, around 20,000 people were displaced by violence or threats in three areas of Jibiya local government area, a local official and community leaders said.
Many crossed the border to stay with families in nearby Niger, others shelter with families in Katsina city or other towns, but some are staying in two camps near the city.
“People are fearful of being kidnapped, killed or displaced,” said Nuhu Iliya, a primary health care official in Jibia local government authority.
“Parents are struggling to get what they need to eat, so the babies and children suffer.”
Northwest Nigeria often faces food insecurity, especially in the lean months before harvest, when stocks run low. But as with other parts of the continent, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has disrupted global wheat supplies and fuel prices have increased leading to rise in food costs.
Farmers outside working fields just outside Katsina city said the price of seeds for stables sorghum, millet and groundnut have doubled since the start of the year.
Wasila Abdullahi, a 24-year-old mother of three, said price hikes were taking a toll on her meagre income.
A measure of maize used to cost N400 but now is N550, she said, as her daughter Khadija played at her feet. The two-year-old suffered malnutrition while recovering from measles.
Farming sustains livelihoods in the North East, but insecurity, the rising cost of fertilizer and diesel, as well as flooding and drought due to changing climate, have combined into a powerful force that is upending lives.
The Federal Government of Nigeria says it is winning the fight against insurgents in the North East and that some areas have now been cleared of militants and are safe for villagers to return and farm.
REUTERS
