Poverty, conflict and climate change will leave 15 million people across Africa’s Sahel belt in need of life-saving aid next year, the UN said as it launched a record $2.7 billion humanitarian appeal for the region in 2017.
Around 40 per cent of the money (about $1 billion) will be used to help some seven million people in Nigeria affected by the jihadist group Boko Haram’s seven-year insurgency, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
The UN’s statement of about 7 million Nigerians needing help in the aftermath of the Boko Haram insurgency comes days after the Nigerian government accused the global body and other international organisations working in the north-east of exaggerating the crisis for financial reasons.
“We are concerned about the blatant attempts to whip up a non-existent fear of mass starvation by some aid agencies, a type of hype that does not provide a solution to the situation on the ground but more to do with calculations for operations financing locally and abroad,” Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari said in a statement by his spokesperson.
The president highlighted what he said were contradictions in some of the claims made by different humanitarian groups about the crisis.
“In a recent instance, one arm of the United Nations screamed that 100,000 people will die due to starvation next year. A different group says a million will die,” he said.
Mr. Buhari was reacting to statements made by officials of international organisations including the UN highlighting the humanitarian crisis in north-east Nigeria.
The U.N. Deputy Humanitarian Coordinator, Peter Lundberg, had said in a statement last Friday that “A projected 5.1 million people will face serious food shortages as the (Boko Haram) conflict and risk of unexploded improvised devices prevented farmers planting for the third year in a row, causing a major food crisis.”
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