A preventable, human-manufactured disaster appears to be unfolding in north-east Nigeria. While the spotlight of media attention is facing elsewhere, the spectre of starvation stalks an area staked out by jihadists as their caliphate. One small state in Nigeria has more displaced people than the entire refugee influx that arrived in Europe last year. The brutal armed conflict has sent a million children out of school. Health services have been decimated and cholera and polio, once eradicated, have returned. The violence of Boko Haram, the jihadist group that still controls parts of the region, is characterised by child killing, abductions and sexual abuse – an oppressive, murderous atmosphere hardly conducive to stable government in a part of Africa them size of Belgium. .
Farmers are unable to harvest their crops and aid agencies say they are unable to reach isolated communities.
Now Save the Children is warning that there is a “real and immediate” threat to the lives of 400,000 children who are malnourished and starving. The charity rightly says the crisis is being crowded out of the humanitarian agenda by the more highly visible disasters affecting Syria, Iraq and Yemen.
Nigeria cannot excuse itself as a failed state. It is Africa’s second-biggest economy. However, more imaginative ways of helping the country are also needed. Save the Children suggests turning ill-gotten gains into crisis-denying cash. Since September illicit Nigerian cash laundered through Britain and seized by British police can be returned to Africa to help with development projects.
The sums are not small: recently a former Nigerian state governor pleaded guilty to a £50m fraud. In 2001, it emerged that a former Nigerian dictator laundered $1.3bn through London banks. Nigeria ranks 136 out of 167 in Transparency International’s corruption index. Its current president asked Britain to return assets held by dishonest Nigerians, shrugging off David Cameron’s suggestion that his nation was “fantastically corrupt”.
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SOURCE : THEGUARDIAN
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