Do you
know that Nigeria has an internally displaced population of 3.3million? And
most of these displaced people are women and children? As things are, these 3.3
million people are only the officially registered internally displaced persons
and many other unregistered internally displaced persons may exist. About 850,000
people in Nigeria’s North East region are internally displaced and the National
Emergency Management Agency has set up only 23 camps to cater for them. What
this means is that this agency expects an average of about 36,956 people to live
in any one of these 23 camps which are mostly National Youth Service Corp camps
or secondary schools that do not have the facilities to deal with such a
population.
Sometimes,
I wonder what it means to be displaced. What it means to abandon your home, to
run from the certainty of all that is familiar into the uncertainty of
mountains and bushes. In all my questing, I have asked a few people; what that
all important thing they will take is: when they hear bombs in distance and the
sound of gunfire approach, what is that one thing they take as they leave, of
all the people I have asked, two variables kept recurring; certificates and
cash. A few people said things like iPads and travel documents, but those were
really few.
In
justification of the choice of their certificates, most people say that when
the insurgents eventually are conquered and there is relative security, only
their certificates will help them rebuild their lives. Considering that, since
the civil war in 1960, at no point have Nigerians been forced to leave their
houses such as now; and when there is a constant threat of death education mostly
becomes secondary, it is encouraging that people still believe in the capacity
of education to get them out of hopelessness and into opportunity.
In all
of these, children are perhaps the worst hit as they are most times pulled from
schools and develop an unwillingness to return to education. It is not hard to
imagine why. The insurgents who terrorize them serve to fight and banish
Western education, the psychological effects of this is in time schools begin
to remind these children of horror, death and bombs.
Perhaps
to alleviate this, in addition to clothing and food drives we carry out for
displaced persons, we should provide these camps with teachers and mentors.
With guides and matrons, because when you live in such atrocious circumstances,
there is the tendency that your world becomes small; reduced from beauty and
possibilities to the sound of shelling and gunshots.
This by
itself is a tragedy we must never allow to happen , we must raise structures
that empower Internally Displace Persons (IDPs) to change their mindsets from
those of victims to survivors. As it is, we are doing dangerously little to
help child victims and it is only our help that can help them win the war against
the very same insurgents who made them leave their homes and schools in the
first place. Doing anything less will amount to the insurgents winning and the
children loosing.
Most
people argue that from the United States to Kenya and Pakistan or France,
Nigeria is not the only country battling insurgency either on its shores or in
an ally nation. The thing with the Nigerian state is that we lack the
capacities these nations have demonstrated in dealing with these insurgencies
and even when we make progress in infrastructure or the economy, lives don’t
improve because the basic necessity of security is not provided.
On one
of the only times I met a displaced child; I asked her the kind of questions
you expect a concerned older person to ask. I asked her ‘What do you want to be
when you grow up?’. I half expected to hear ‘doctor’ or ‘pilot’ or ‘hair
dresser’, but no. Her face turned blank and she said “Alive. I want to be alive
when I grow up.” I did not ask any more questions. The tragedy that the Nigerian
state has become hit me.
By Adejoh Idoko Momoh.
