WHEN the journey to Maiduguri came on stream last week, I was all over the place with mixed feelings. I was there last 25 years ago. I wanted to see what had become of it in this Boko Haram era. There were two other things I wanted to see. The first was life inside an Internally-Displaced Persons’ (IDPs’) camp. The second was to make a personal assessment of where we really are with regard to the war on terror, beyond the banal propaganda pabulum that Buhari’s Information Minister, Lai Mohammed, and the military, regularly dish out.
When we hit the Maiduguri metropolitan roads I was all eyes, if you know what I mean. There is this jingle on radio and television about how to identify suicide bombers, and it seemed to me that I was seeing them everywhere – hijab-wearing women, al majiris (as is common in all Muslim Northern cities) tricycles carrying people and loads. There was a junction where a serious traffic holdup developed. Then, I saw this young man in his late twenties wearing very dirty trousers and sweater. He had a greasy bag on his shoulders and looked (at least to me) like an inmate from Sambisa Forest. When I pointed him out to our driver, he laughed, and said Boko Haram cannot enter Maiduguri again.
“They will be caught by the civilian JTF and the soldiers before they come in”. His confidence helped calm my nerves a bit.
In Maiduguri alone, there are 30 IDP camps, plus another one in Biu, according to Ndahi Pindar Sawa, the Deputy Director of Press in the Office of the Governor of Borno State, who took us round. We first visited the IDP camp at Damboa-Biu Road. After waiting for thirty minutes or so at the gate, we decided to move to the next one at the Teachers’ Quarters. This estate was built specifically for teachers, but before they were allocated the refugees started streaming in from the frontiers shellacked by Boko Haram.
When we got in there, I was attracted by a makeshift market the displaced persons had developed. Wherever human beings gather, there must be economic activities. But these were people who only escaped from their communities with their lives. A market developed by such people is like people who have nothing selling to people who have nothing! I took some nice shots of the camp, its dwellers and market.
As we were about to get back into the car, a young man (obviously a member of the Civilian JTF) stopped me and informed me that some inmates of the camp wanted to speak with me. He volunteered to translate. Three elderly men stepped forward, and complained of hunger. According to them, the seven kitchens in the camp had not cooked any food for them in two days, and they had to make do with a watery pap which one of them showed me: your dog won’t touch it.
Well as a child nearly fifty years ago in Biafra, I was a refugee (now such people are called IDPs). We were driven into a forest known as Agbo Ogbele in Abiriba. Incidentally, the officer who led the Federal troops for the operation was General Muhammed Shuwa, who Boko Haram assassinated in his residence in Maiduguri in November, 2012. See life!
The life of a person uprooted from his community and put at the mercy of others for their upkeep is not enviable, to say the least. Fathers lose their dignity when they watch helplessly as hunger draws rings around their family members. Of course, we reported the matter to Governor Kassim Shettima, who immediately called in a young man, probably his assistant on IDPs, to find out why (and if) the cooking stopped and report back.
“If I have not heard from you before I get to the airport I will go myself and investigate”.
Truth is: feeding about two million people twice or thrice a day is no mean budget. Right now, the camps are being run by the National Emergency Management Authority (NEMA) and their state counterparts (SEMA). These bodies provide the IDPs with food, and they are run by Nigerian civil servants (with all the corner-cutting antics you see everywhere). Meanwhile, where is General TY Danjuma’s committee?
The good thing, though, is that the Borno State Government is ready for the end of the insurgency. We were shown an armada of agricultural machineries (some of which are found nowhere else in the country) stocked and ready for deployment once peace returns. The same applies for a gigantic array of water supply machines for year-round agriculture. Borno is ready to go big time into commercial, mechanised farming when peace returns.
So, when will this peace return? That is the question. A BIG, question. Federal Government and the Army paint a picture of an insurgency that has been, according to Lai Mohammed, “technically defeated”. They say Boko Haram has been “so degraded that it could no longer plan attacks”. Oh yeah? During our tour of projects in in Maiduguri, we were to visit an irrigation project at Alau, which, I understand, is very close to Dalori. That was on Tuesday, 26th January.
When we found that we were driving out of Maiduguri we became apprehensive. There was this severe security atmosphere, yet lorries, buses and trucks laden with goods and agricultural products were being let through checkpoints with minimal checks. We decided to discontinue the journey despite assurances by officials that there was no problem.
Four days after we came back to Lagos, Boko Haram stormed Dalori and killed nearly 100 people. They also hit towns in Adamawa. ‘TECHNICALLY DEFEATED”? Incidentally, it was the same officer who said there was no problem that called me to report the Dalori massacre! More attacks hit Bulabulin Umarari, two kilometres outside Maiduguri and Muna Garage within it since then.
Our media colleagues told us that the defeat of Boko Haram is only “half done”, as they still maintain some presence in up to half of the 27 local government areas!
VANGUARD
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