PH
– At least 10 people are “starving to death” every day in a camp in northeast Nigeria for people displaced by Boko Haram violence, highlighting warnings about a food crisis in the Lake Chad region.
A civilian vigilante and a soldier said the deaths were occurring in the town of Banki where they are based, about 130km southeast of the Borno state capital, Maiduguri.
Troops liberated the remote town near the Cameroon border in September last year.
“People are dying in large numbers in the camp every day from lack of food,” said the vigilante.
“As of Wednesday we counted 376 graves in the Bulachira cemetery.”
A soldier said: “The whole camp is hunger-stricken. People are emaciated and starving to death. If nobody intervenes, a huge catastrophe is looming because these people can’t hold out.”
The Borno state government and aid agencies have warned about acute food shortages in the Lake Chad region as a result of seven years of violence.
The United Nations said in May that 9.2 million people living around the lake, which forms the border of Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon and Niger, were in desperate need of food.
