For many years, people displaced by the Boko Haram crisis in northeastern Nigeria have found refuge in camps at the heart of Borno. While the government has now shut down most of these camps, many of their former inhabitants remain in the communities. They are not doing too well.
Just when Zara Buba starts to get comfortable, someone in uniform comes and rips her from her home. It happened one afternoon 11 years ago back in Bama when soldiers burnt her house to the ground. “You can go anywhere; we have finished our job,” they told her as the building’s joints cracked and fell apart.
They did not offer any reason for their action. After months of moving from place to place, losing her husband to hypertension and two children to extrajudicial murders, Zara finally settled in Maiduguri, Borno’s capital city in northeastern Nigeria. She hoped to find safety, stability, and support. The first displacement camp she arrived at turned her away, but she was welcomed when she got to the Dalori II camp. Then, it happened again.
“One night, around 2 a.m., they [camp officials] woke us up. We were frightened, but they told us it was the Governor that came to the camp. I called my daughter to join us. They lined us up into men and women and gave us cards,” she recalls.
The cards, which made them eligible for palliatives, by implication also marked them for eviction from the camp.
After that incident in late June 2021, the IDPs stopped receiving aid. About a year later, the state authorities closed the camp like several others in the capital city. Those who received the cards that night in June were given cash and foodstuff so they could start lives afresh elsewhere, preferably closer to their home communities. The government hoped that by cutting the pipe of humanitarian assistance and resettling the IDPs, they would become more resilient and it would reignite bursts of economic activities in the long-abandoned communities around the state.
But many displaced people do not share in this vision.
Shutting down the camps has meant depriving them of aid and basic services such as affordable healthcare, education, clean water, and decent sanitary facilities. Those who lived in concrete houses are now condemned to sleep in makeshift tents with leaky roofs and muddy floors. Those with businesses no longer have a sizeable population of ready customers. Life has been more brutal in the city since the closures, but many IDPs remain still. For them, Maiduguri is as close to home as anywhere the government might replant their feet outside their ancestral communities — many of which remain unsafe.
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