A group under the aegis of Displaced Women and Children Foundation has raised alarm that 142 displaced families are not being catered for in Riyom LGA of Plateau State.
The alarm was raised by the Executive Director Displaced Women and Children Foundation, Salis Mohammed Abdulsalam, in a chat with journalists in Jos.
Abdulsalam said, “The Internally Displaced Persons in Riyom LGA, live in some shops; there are about 142 families.
“Some of the children there, we refer to them as unaccompanied; they have lost their parents and siblings, and there are orphans in the true meaning of the word orphan.
“Some of them do not have homes to go back to, because their homes were razed down by unknown gunmen as they say or insurgents or killer herdsmen.
“While others have homes but cannot go back for fear of being attacked again, others lost their farmlands as well as breadwinners on the farmlands. Those are the kind of IDPs or reasons for those kinds of IDPs we have in Riyom LGA”, he lamented.
“The sad aspect of the whole of this arrangement is the complete neglect, they leave purely on humanitarian charity.
“Structurally, the negative repercussion is the absence of any form of education for the children, which is more than the population of the adults in the camps.
“We should not be unmindful of how many times we’ve had the whole trunk A federal highway shutdown like for passersby from Abuja, Akwanga and the rest, from that axis.
“This kind of situations is what breaths the kind of youths that carryout such actions. The youths that carryout such actions are a product of lack of post crisis management in the last 15 years on the Plateau.
“Our fear today is, what these kind of children in that camp will become eventually; and I think that even if we were asleep, we need to wake up”, he advised.
He maintained that the Council’s Chairman, State Government and other groups, “cannot continue to pay leap service, in trying to source for bags of grains to go and give these people.
“There has to be a structured arrangement to get them out of that situation, and I don’t think it is difficult; I think we have not really reached out or exhausted concept that can get these people out of that situation.”
On the way out the situation, Abdulsalam said, “First of all, the world does not even know of the existence of that kind of problem; everybody celebrates IDPs in the North-East, forgetting that IDPs were first created on the Plateau, before that of the North-East.
“Now, we will not want to accept the fact, but it is the honest truth that crisis and their peace related issues is more complex than any other place in Nigeria.
“We’ve had the ethno-religious, political, we’ve also tested insurgency all on the Plateau. So this has created a complex problem that sadly produced all these different sets of IDPs.
“People just only talk about the North-East that has a common enemy, and only one kind of violent crisis against insurgents; it is everybody against insurgents.
“Therefore on the way out, first and foremost they have a host, which is the local government Chairman, some of the things that has to be done will have to come with government consent.”
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