The UN also reports that, despite this dis-speakable conditions, as many as 30,000 Nigerian refugees are still on their way to chad amid uncertain hope that the Boko haram crisis could get worse.
“Unless these refugees can be located and moved to an established refugee camp at Baga-Sola, 70 kilometres from the Nigerian border, they are going to remain extremely vulnerable where they are,” head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Chad, Alice Armanni Sequi, was quoted in a report by UN’s news agency, Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN).
“Many of the islands are little more than swampy marshes or sandbars. While some are inhabited, their residents have little to offer the refugees except their homes: Chad’s Lake Region is one of the poorest parts of one of the poorest and least developed countries in the world. In some communities, the recent influx has more than doubled the population,” the report said.
“The current situation is quite complex. Many of the refugees have settled in places where we cannot provide them with any support, even though we desperately want to,” the deputy representative for the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) in Chad, Mamadou Dian Balde, said, explaining that some of the islands are at least a day’s motorboat ride from the shore.
More than 17,000 Nigerians have taken refuge in Chad since May 2013, according to UNHCR. An additional 100,000 have fled to Niger and 37,000 to Cameroon. reports say
The biggest influx into Chad - more than 14,000, at a rate of up to 1,000 a day - followed Boko Haram’s January 3 attack on the northeastern Nigerian town of Baga. Hundreds of people were killed and entire villages burned. More than one in five of the new arrivals lack any form of shelter, according to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.
“Most refugees in the past year or two went to Niger, which is closer and easier to access (overland), or even Cameroon. The fact that they started to come in large numbers [across the lake] into Chad was an act of desperation,” Balde said.
The camp at Baga-Sola, known as Dar-es-Salam (“place of peace”) can house 15,000 refugees and is currently hosting just over 3,000. UNHCR is working with the Chadian government to transport an additional 2,000 refugees on the islands to the camp.
The Ministry of Public Health has posted doctors and nurses in Dar-es-Salam and added extra health workers to communities hosting large numbers of refugees. Disease and outbreaks, such as malaria and cholera, remain of concern, however. And in this part of Chad, maternal healthcare is next to non-existent.
Local authorities say they know of at least 1,100 Chadians who had been living and working in Nigeria and who fled back home when the violence erupted. Aid agencies say the actual number is probably much higher.
The return of these breadwinners has cut off a financial lifeline for many families.
“Although they have returned to their families of origin, they carry many of the same vulnerabilities as the Nigerian refugees. And as they live in their households of origin, among host communities, they are harder to identify. This puts them at a greater risk of remaining in the shadow of aid, which has until now been largely concentrated in refugee camps,” Sequi said.
In the Lake Region, almost a third of the population does not have regular access to enough food to live a healthy life, according to the UN’s World Food Programme. Malnutrition rates among children under five exceed the emergency threshold of 15 per cent.
The economic situation has been made worse by the closure of Chad’s land border with Nigeria in August, which halted the movement of local traders, herders and merchants, and has led to food shortages and rising food prices.
The host communities “must not be forgotten by the aid community. They shared all they had (with the refugees), depleting their own food stocks and economic assets...So increasing our assistance to host and local communities remains critical,” Sequi said.
According to OCHA, some $31 million is needed to meet humanitarian needs in the Lake Region, including those of the refugees. How much of this will come through is uncertain: last year’s Chad appeal was just 36 per cent funded.
“Chad is historically an underfunded crisis. The humanitarian community in Chad is constantly faced with the challenge of finding the financial inputs to do our work, and it’s no less for this operation,” Sequi said.
WFP, which has supplied more than 6,000 refugees with emergency food rations, and has begun distributing one-month rations to people in the camp, says that it will need nearly $11 million to meet the needs of everyone.
“The refugees that we received last year, we were able to react to quite quickly, and provide them with food aid distributions. Today, our biggest challenge is that the situation itself is almost completely unfunded,” the deputy country director for WFP in Chad, Peter Musoko, said.
OCHA says it is now reaching out to the Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) to support aid operations in response to the Nigeria crisis.
For the moment, many agencies have been fronting their internal cash to ensure the immediate response, Sequi said, but added that this is not sustainable, nor will it allow for any scale-up.
The UN says it is planning for the arrival of many as 30,000 Nigerian refugees over the coming months, depending on the security situation.
“It’s one of those situations where the challenge is greater than the resources available. Humanitarian actors are doing all they can but…getting more funding for our response in the region will be critical to our ultimate success,” Sequi said.
There are indications that this might grow worse following the naira fall. The naira crashed through the key level of 200 to the dollar this week in a rout sparked by weak oil prices and escalating tension over the postponement of a presidential election in Africa’s biggest economy, Reuters news agency has reported.
Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Governor, Godwin Emefiele, had said on Thursday that the naira was “appropriately priced” despite a nearly 25 per cent slump against the dollar in the last three months, asking investors to stay calm.
“We are not in the best of times but there’s no need to panic,” he told CNBC Africa in an interview. He ruled out an emergency Monetary Policy Committee meeting, and said floating the currency was not an option.
In the latest update on its reserves, Reuters noted, the CBN said its stockpile of dollars had dropped to $33.4 billion as of February 10, a decline of $1 billion in nine trading sessions since January 28.
Dealers noted further intervention during chaotic trading on Wednesday and Thursday. On both days, leading banks triggered an agreed ‘circuit-breaker’ to halt electronic trading because of the pace of the naira’s fall.
The latest reserves data marked a dramatic escalation in efforts to stabilise the naira from the CBN, which last year forked out an average $20 million a day to prop up the currency.
The naira ended Thursday at a new record closing low of 205.60 to the dollar, compared with the central bank’s target range of 160-176.
culled from Tribune
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