By Hauwau Shehu Maikeffi
The afternoon heat in Maiduguri doesn’t just burn; it suffocates. Every step kicks up dry dust that hangs in the air like a stubborn ghost. At the ATC Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp, long lines of women and children cluster under scraps of shade, tattered tarpaulins, bent umbrellas, anything they can find. In the middle of it all stands Amina Musa, thirteen years old, barefoot, holding a metal bowl that has seen better days. Today, like yesterday, and the day before, she waits for food that may not come.
Across Borno and Benue states, survival has become a game of chance. Over 2.5 million displaced Nigerians now sit at the edges of hope, as major UN agencies quietly scale back operations, their budgets bleeding from donor fatigue and mounting global crises elsewhere. In the camps, the news spreads faster than wildfire. Food supplies are drying up. Essential services are thinning out. For the families who fled bullets and bloodshed, the slow violence of hunger feels even more brutal.
“We just stand and wait,” said Hauwa Yusuf, a mother of four in Gubio Road camp. She folds her arms tightly across her chest as if to shield herself from the emptiness. “Sometimes we hear they will bring rice, oil, beans… but we don’t see anything. It’s just dust and waiting.”
In places like Muna Garage and Dalori, residents must walk distances of 10 to 15 kilometers for the chance, just the chance of receiving a bag of grain or a sachet of oil. In Benue’s overcrowded Agan camp, the numbers are worse: people are stranded up to 60 kilometers away from the nearest aid center. Many walk entire days without seeing a single truck. Sometimes, even when food is on the move, it doesn’t reach them. A few weeks ago, authorities intercepted an ambulance an actual ambulance, loaded not with the sick or injured, but with stolen bags of rice meant for IDP camps. Thirty-six bags vanished into the black market while children in the camps clutched at their empty stomachs.
UNICEF warns that malnutrition cases are climbing at an alarming rate. In Borno alone, over 14,000 children are receiving emergency treatment, but countless others slip unnoticed between the cracks, growing thinner by the day. At Agan camp in Benue, Mariam Adaji eight months pregnant and visibly frail recounts the last time she saw a health worker: “Two months ago, maybe more. Now we just drink water when we can find it. Some days, nothing at all.”
The infrastructure that once offered a fragile lifeline is crumbling. Taps are dry. Clinics are closed. Food warehouses are half-empty, and those that are full are guarded like fortresses. What remains is a hollow system, stretched thin and failing those it was meant to protect.
