The United Nations, UN, has harped on the need for food, shelter, improved security, water, education, health services, among others, for Internally Displaced Persons, IDPs across the country, saying no fewer than 14.8 million IDPs are currently in need of urgent humanitarian assistance.
This was disclosed by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, UNOCHA, Tuesday, where it called for additional support to enable displaced persons survive daily.
The UNOCHA Humanitarian Coordinator in Nigeria, Peter Lundberg, while addressing the issue called for a pragmatic collaboration among stakeholders to mitigate the humanitarian crisis in the North East, particularly in the three most severely affected by insurgents activities – Borno, Adamawa and Yobe states.
He forewarned that about 75,000 lives would be lost by next year if urgent measures were not put in place to stop the crisis in the region.
Lundberg said, “More than 400,000 children out of the estimated 14.8 million affected are at critical stage of survival and the situation is rapidly moving toward the wrong direction.
“The humanitarian situation in these zones – Borno, Adamawa and Yobe are having global proportion and one of the worst in the African continent.”
The Coordinator specifically called on philanthropists, the three tiers of Nigerian governments, donor agencies, and the media to assist victims of the insurgency by scaling up resources, even as he urged donor agencies and partners to redeem their pledges to put smiles on the faces of the affected Nigerians.
Speaking further, he said, “The agency requested for about 485 million dollars to effectively cushion the effect of humanitarian crisis in the region in 2016, but only 180 million dollars have been received so far.
“The responses are too meagre to resolve the alarming situation.
“The resource we have made available and complement with the resources government has made available is simply not enough and is why we need to scale it up.
“We will reach out to the international community to join hands because we can only solve these problems if we join hands with all the people in Nigeria who have the willingness and the capacity to actually inject.
“We have a chance to mitigate it and our appeal for next year is to target or work with 5.1 million dollars in the whole food security.
“This food distribution will include everything that can empower people because these are people who use to have a life of their own,” Lundberg added.
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