Barely four months into the closure of the Internally Displaced Persons’ camps in Maiduguri and subsequent resettlement to their communities, about 12,000 of such resettled persons have reportedly found their way back to the IDP camps in Monguno town, Monguno LGA in Northern Borno on the fringes of Lake Chad.
The resettled IDPs who were sent out of camps by the Borno State Government on the grounds of returning to their rebuilt communities, according to an international NGO source, have returned to some IDP camps managed by the government in Monguno because their communities were still inaccessible due to the nefarious activities of insurgents.
The source made this disclosure on Wednesday in Abuja during a training workshop for journalists drawn from the North-Eastern states of Borno, Adamawa and Yobe.
“12,486 individuals constituting about three thousand households who were sent out of the IDP camps in Maiduguri returned to the IDP camps in Monguno.
”This is besides the other IDPs we already have in the camps we manage in Monguno. We manage six IDP camps and we have ninety-six thousand IDPs already before these twelve thousand persons came,” said a facilitator who pleaded anonymity.
He also noted that the other camps were being managed by the International Organisation of Migration, having received a large number of migrants – the exact figure of which the official claimed to be oblivious.
He further said, “In the three states we operate in the North-East, that is Borno, Adamawa and Yobe states, there are over two million IDPs representing 40% of the population residing in the IDP camps, and this has led to increased human rights violations and abuses in these camps”.
Elaborating further on the fate of the displaced persons, the humanitarian worker blamed the development on the insecurity caused by the ISWAP terrorists and the state government resettlement committee managing the unfortunate development, stating that the NGO was not hitherto contacted by the committee for input on the resettlement since they had been operating in the local government area for some time.
He said, “The reason for this situation is because there was no coordination between the NGO and the resettlement committee. If the committee had contacted us we have partners that handle shelter issues – we would have approached them to provide trampolines and other emergency shelter equipment, to erect structures even if it was temporary shelters in their communities.
”Most of their communities are yet to be rebuilt and most of them are still being confronted with insecurity challenges, as Boko Haram/ISWAP terrorists still hibernate in those areas,” he remarked.
The official clarified that Monguno, as a local government, has about thirteen wards, out of which ”only three are accessible, the remaining ten wards are not accessible”.
”We are still struggling to contain them in the six camps under our management as there are not enough shelters to accommodate such a large number of households,” the official concluded.
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