Nigeria urgently needs help to avert a famine

Aid agencies  sometimes hurt their own cause by crying wolf in anticipation of dire circumstances that do not materialise. In north eastern Nigeria the opposite is the case. The wolves have long since arrived.

Not since the 1960s, when images of starving children drew attention to the plight of ethnic Igbos living under siege in the separatist enclave of Biafra, has Africa’s most populous nation faced a humanitarian crisis on this scale. Not since the famine in Somalia six years ago, when a quarter of million people succumbed to hunger and disease, has the international response been so lethally inadequate.

Boko Haram, the jihadist group that has waged a campaign of terror across northeastern Nigeria since 2009, is on the retreat. As Nigeria’s military has recaptured territory once controlled by the group, the depredations it has inflicted have become all too apparent.

Unlike in Somalia in 2011, there is no immediate threat of drought. But normally resilient farming communities, hardened to life on the fringes of the desert, have been driven from their land, and tens of thousands of children are separated from their parents.

As many as 120,000 people will be at risk of death from starvation in the coming year, according to the UN, which this week belatedly launches a campaign to raise $1bn towards relief efforts.

The prevalence of severe malnutrition in children is several times the levels considered an emergency by the World Food Programme. An estimated 7m people overall are in need of aid.

There has been a failure to mobilise sufficient resources in response. Struggling with an economic crisis brought on by the collapse in the price of oil, the Nigerian government has been far too slow to recognise that it needs help.

Meanwhile, the attention of many aid agencies has been focused on the more visible crises in Syria, Iraq and Yemen at Nigeria's expense.

Britain’s Department for International Development is right to single out the UN for criticism. The UN is expected to take the lead in providing early warnings in emergencies of this kind. Not only has it failed in that respect but its operations, according to experts on the ground, remain chaotic and poorly staffed.
But Britain too could be more imaginative in its response. Like a number of European countries, the UK is sitting on tens of millions of dollars in public funds misappropriated by corrupt former Nigerian officials.

More than $1bn looted by the former dictator Sani Abacha remains tied up in forfeiture proceedings in European and US jurisdictions 18 years after his death. A substantial proportion of this, in Switzerland, Luxembourg. Liechtenstein and the Channel Islands, could be released immediately, according to legal experts.

Muhammadu Buhari, the former military ruler who was swept back to power in elections last year pledging to wage war against corruption, has sought to freeze billions more misappropriated under recent governments.

He could agree to the creation of a trust fund — jointly managed by Nigerian and donor officials — to facilitate the speedy return and deployment in the north-east of some of these funds.

Two moral imperatives would be served. One, the need to scale up rapidly the medical and food aid required to avert a famine.

Two, to ensure money that is rightfully Nigeria’s is returned without further ado.

There could be no better way to use it than to save lives and begin a process of recovery that will require extraordinary resources for many years to come.