Political parties are exploiting abject poverty among Nigeria’s internally displaced people to serve their interests during elections.
On the eve of Nigeria’s last presidential election, around 4 p.m., Ibrahim Hassan wore one of his finest clothes, grabbed his voter card, exited his tent at the Muna Garage displacement camp, and walked towards the main road where a flock of vehicles waited. He was making an hour-long journey from Maiduguri to his hometown to cast his vote — alongside thousands of other internally displaced people, including his wife, son, and daughter-in-law. By the time the dust settled and all the trucks and buses and cars had driven off, a strange silence settled on the camp. The only people left were those who were too old to travel, those who were too young to vote, and a few others.
Some of those voters would eventually return to the camp a few hundred naira richer — or a little more if they got lucky. Many others would return with growling bellies, empty pockets, and curses under their tongues.
For many IDPs in Nigeria, while the election season may not give them a rare chance to engage their representatives in government and other political aspirants, it presents an opportunity for them to fill their stomachs with nutritious meals, grace their palms with wads of money, and maybe even add fresh yards of clothing to their collection, so long as they vote for particular candidates. It may not seem like a mouthwatering deal, but for a displaced person who has gone several days without decent food and who is not certain where his next wage will come from, it is a much better use of their day than idling around or voting simply based on conviction.
And the political parties know it.
HumAngle spoke to many internally displaced people across northeastern and northwestern Nigeria who confirmed that they were targets of vote-buying and intimidation during elections. A lot of them also said they have been treated like second-class citizens since their displacement and have not benefited much from the freedoms and powers that naturally come with a democratic system.
There are over 3.3 million internally displaced people in Nigeria, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM). Out of this number, 2.3 million are in the North East — of which 42 per cent are above the age of 18. Borno state alone is home to 1.7 million IDPs. Some of them said during last year’s elections, the majority of those who voted in their communities were displaced people brought in from camps many miles away. Auwal, an IDP living in the Shuwari resettled community, remembers that three large schoolbuses and three dump trucks, known locally as Yellow Buckets, were used to convey hundreds of displaced people from Maiduguri and its outskirts to the Gulumba area of Bama.
Ibrahim Hassan was young when he first voted, maybe even too young. He says he is 53 now, but the first time he voted was in August 1979 during the tightly contested presidential election that ushered in Shehu Shagari’s administration. “We voted for the winning team,” he said, thumbprinting the air before him as he remembered those days with pride.
Back in Malumri, his village in the Mafa area of Borno state, northeastern Nigeria, politicians used to visit the locals to solicit their votes, and then they decided for themselves. That stopped after their displacement.
When Boko Haram insurgents unleashed violence in Maiduguri, Borno’s capital city, in 2009, news of it trickled down to Malumri. The boots and bullets soon followed. The terrorists arrived in his community and frequently snatched their goats, cattle, and donkeys. When that wasn’t enough, they started imposing strange rules, such as, ‘Women can no longer go out to fetch water.’ One night, Ibrahim, his family, and over a hundred people left for Mafa town. Some order had been restored to Maiduguri at this time, so they made their way down, trekking the whole 50 or so kilometres. The journey took two days.
First, they camped at a filling station where humanitarian workers shared loaves of bread and canned fish with them. Three days later, soldiers relocated them to what is now the Muna displacement camp.
“They told us that we were going back to our village after three months. We believed them,” Ibrahim recalled. “But here we are after nine years. Malumri is still not safe.”
The decade-long displacement has affected many things, from their livelihoods to their relationships and access to basic amenities. But one of the least-discussed consequences is its impact on their political freedoms.
For one, thousands of internally displaced people are not able to exercise their right to vote due to the lack of an enabling environment.
In 2015, Nigeria introduced a policy framework that stipulates how elections are to be conducted for the benefit of IDPs, who often live in camps that are a long distance from their home communities. In many cases, their communities cannot be accessed safely by government officials due to the presence of violent non-state actors. To get around this difficulty, the framework proposed that voter registration exercises should be done at displacement camps, and provision should be made for the distribution of permanent voter cards (PVCs) in the same location. Also, voting centres are to be established either at the camps or in central locations.
In reality, however, voter registration exercises did not take place in many IDP camps, nor did voting itself. Thousands of IDPs were instead transported to cast their ballots in their local government areas of origin. One 2023 study discovered that while the vast majority of displaced people in northeastern Nigeria believed in the electoral process and were keen on voting, about a quarter of them were unable to get their PVCs. Reasons for this include lack of awareness about the registration process, loss of cards, tediousness of registering, lack of nearby registration points, and absence of feedback after registering.
The forceful closure of camps in Maiduguri has also contributed to the disenfranchisement of IDPs. Nine camps were shut down between May 2021 and December 2022, a move that affected over 153,000 IDPs. Many of those who were resettled complained that they could not vote because they were assigned to polling stations in Maiduguri, not those in their new location, and they did not have enough money to travel just for the elections.
Many IDPs express nostalgia for the political freedom they enjoyed before their displacement. Auwal, for example, said representatives of different parties used to court members of his community. They collected money from all the parties and voted for whichever they wanted. Now, he contrasted, “We do whatever they ask us to do; we are like prisoners.”
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