In January 2021, the Borno State government began shutting down the IDP camps in the state and resettling the long-suffering occupants.
For Lawan Bukar, 50, life is truly a rollercoaster. Each time he sees a ray of hope, something rears its head and extinguishes it.
In 2014, months went by without an attack on his village in Kayamla, Konduga Local Government Area (LGA). Then suddenly, Boko Haram terrorists stormed the village one night, massacred more than 40 residents and razed houses. Those who survived the attack fled. Mr Bukar was the Bulama (village head) of the village, where he might never return.
"We never thought we were going to escape the gruesome attack when it happened," he said. The attack forced his family into an Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp where - although unknown to them at the time - the family members would spend the next seven years.
As an IDP at a facility of the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC), he abandoned farming and took to selling water in a cart because he could not keep up with the rising cost of fertiliser and lease payments for farmland.
When the government closed the IDP camp, Mr Bukar and members of his family began a strange new life. They were among the thousands evicted from the NYSC IDP camp in May 2021 and resettled in Auno, a town on the outskirts of Maiduguri, where the government had constructed 500 homes for the IDPs.
Though he was informed of the resettlement exercise this time, Mr Bukar said he never thought it would take him into destitution.
He was initially grateful to the government for providing him with a proper home for the first time since 2014. But feeding immediately became a problem for his family. "We're suffering and it's because there's no food. That's why."
Reconstruction, Rehabilitation And Resettlement
IDP camps used to dot the landscape of Borno State, most of them in Maiduguri. For close to a decade, they were homes to about a million people displaced by the Boko Haram insurgency in the Nigerian northeast. The occupants had arrived from different communities but their stories were similar: their villages had been pillaged and plundered by heartless insurgents.
At the camp, they found some sort of solace. No Boko Haram fighter was lurking and they were fed and provided basic health care by state authorities, humanitarian organisations and philanthropists.
But when Governor Babagana Zulum was first elected in 2019, he was keen on resettling the IDPs back to their homes, or at least, out of the camps.
"It is no longer sustainable for IDPs to depend on handouts coming from neither NGOs nor from NEDC or NEMA," Mr Zulum told visiting members of the House of Representatives committee on the North East Development Commission (NEDC) in September 2020.
The governor said government and its partners could no longer sustain feeding the over a million IDPs at the camps. The permanent solution was to "ensure reconstruction of communities, rehabilitation and resettlement of the IDPs back to their ancestral homes in a dignified manner," he said."You can visit any of the IDP camps, the only slogan you hear is 'we want to go back home'," he said.
In January 2021, the government began shutting down the IDP camps, offering the occupants three options of resettlement: settle in government-established resettlement sites, return to their ancestral communities (even without a home from the government) or receive support to rent houses in the Maiduguri metropolis.
Naturally, most of the IDPs who already lost all they owned to the insurgency, opted for the government homes. But, for many, that choice did not offer what they thought it promised.
Settling into Penury
More than a dozen former IDPs interviewed across resettlement areas in the state said they felt dejected and hopeless.
Former IDPs in the Auno resettlement area in Konduga LGA, Shuwari in Jere LGA and some living outside formal resettlement areas in Maiduguri and Konduga, share similar stories of neglect and hardship.
And this is so for many reasons; at the camps, they had access to aid such as food items, monetary allowances and donations from the government, humanitarian organisations and charitable individuals.
But as soon as they were resettled, the government banned the delivery of any kind of aid to resettled communities, leaving the former IDPs in economic woes since many of them are without sustainable sources of income to cater for themselves and their families.
This has left most of them hungry and vulnerable more than a year after the resettlement exercise began, a Human Rights Watch (HRW) report found.
The shutting of camps, according to the HRW, has left the former IDPs "without sustainable alternatives to ensure their safety and livelihoods."
In another report, the International Crisis Group urged the government to halt the resettlement process and take steps to protect those who have been relocated from harm and access to aid and support.
"The hasty process is endangering displaced people's lives - putting them closer to the fighting and cutting them off from support," the group said. "By exposing civilians to hardship, the government risks giving jihadist groups an opportunity to forge ties with relocated communities and draw benefits from their economic activities."
These days, with no farmland of his own, Mr Bukar spends most of his time scouring the forest -- sometimes accompanied by his children -- for firewood, which he sells to commuters on the Maiduguri-Damaturu road just outside Auno."A trip (to the forest) lasts up to three hours," Modu Abadam, Mr Bukar's neighbour who also sells firewood, said.
"We sell 30 pieces of the small ones for N100. One full cart costs between N1,000 and N1,500," said Mr Abadam, who had previously lived in Mogcolis IDP camp.
Distraught
When Sale Ali, 39, was resettled in Shuwari in Jere LGA, he hoped it would be for a few months before he was taken back to his ancestral Marte LGA. But at the time the government shut down Bakassi camp where he lived for four years, there were only 136 houses left in Marte for grabs by former IDPs, according to Mr Ali. But Marte indigenes at the camp were over 1,000 households.
"The remaining of us pleaded with the lawmaker in our constituency who reached out to the governor and helped us secure a place in Shuwari, Jere," he said. "We were promised that more houses and villages would be reopened in Marte and they will take us there. That's what we are waiting for."The father of seven spent the first 12 months idle and waiting to be relocated to Marte, where he planned to engage in farming.
"As that was not forthcoming, I started going to Muna garage just to help people with their work and I get N200, N500. That was how I started getting small money. Later on, I started hawking meat in the garage," he said.
"I am happy to be self-reliant but imagine a N1,000 or N1,500 daily income to feed two wives and seven children."
Although the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) occasionally supplies food items to the settlement, people like Mr Ali were not given the items. Only those registered from Farm Centre are beneficiaries.
Jugudum Salisu who receives the NEMA aid said it usually contained 10 kilogrammes of rice and beans and 20 litres of oil shared among 10 households. According to him, the supplies arrived once a month, sometimes once in two months.
An Irregular grant
For each household leaving the IDP camp, the government said it gave the man N100,000 and the woman N50,000. But some IDPs interviewed across different resettlement areas claim they received far less than that.
For instance, IDPs interviewed at the Auno resettled communities, including Messrs Bukar and Abadam, said they only received N17,000 monthly for three months. Others along the Konduga-Bama road said they received only N20,000 once. Those interviewed in Shuwari, Jere said they received between N12,000 and N20,000, suggesting either that the payments were irregular or the former IDPs were shortchanged.
The governor's spokesperson, Isa Gusau, however, explained to our reporter that the grants given to the IDPs are not uniform across all resettlement areas.
According to him, the amount was determined by the peculiarities of the LGA or communities where they were being resettled.
"It depends on the peculiarity of the local government area," he told our reporter in a telephone interview.
"But substantially (N100,000 for men and N50,000 for women) are the commonest amounts that the governor gives. At the same time, he (the governor) looks at those who appear to be more stable, because some communities are more stable than others. So you will find out that there are communities that are more settled like IDPs who are close to Maiduguri are more settled than IDPs who are far away from Maiduguri."
Leaving a livelihood behind
Khadija Musa, 28, was not sure which was better for her between owning a home where she struggles to feed and living in an IDP camp with enough to feed her children. Eventually, she settled for the latter.
"I was more comfortable at the camp," she said. "I have a job there, I sew and earn. My children have more freedom and access to Islamiyya education, which I pay for every month."
At the IDP camp, Ms Musa said she was employed by an organisation she referred simply to as 'Rescue'. The organisation had sewing machines with which she sewed clothes and got paid.There, three of her four children, Umaima, 15, Zarau, 13, and Muhammad, 10, attended a no-fee-paying school in the camp and an Islamiyya (Islamic School) outside the camp. She said she paid a monthly tuition of N500 per child at the Islamiyya because she had a job.
"I am very proficient with the sewing machine. They pay me based on how much work I do for them. Sometimes I get up to N15,000 or N20,000 depending on how many clothes I sew. But I stopped when we left the camp because the sewing equipment was not mine. It was for the organisation," she said.
Now in Auno, all she does to feed her children is trek long distances to the forest to fetch firewood for sale.
About a year ago, she fell ill and doctors at the Umaru Shehu General Hospital in Maiduguri told her to avoid carrying heavy items.
Although she did not stop going to fetch firewood, which she believed contributed to her ill health, she has reduced her trips. Now she works as a farmhand at a neighbouring village, earning N500 a day, which she said barely sustains her and her children.
Experts speak on sustainability
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A lot of the resettlement areas are not sustainable, a senior analyst at the Crisis Group, Vincent Foucher, said.
He said PREMIUM TIMES' findings echoed what his organisation found in an earlier report.
"There are next to no employment opportunities, mobility is constrained, markets are supplied poorly or expensively, there is not enough secure access to land," he said.
Even though the government constructed schools and health centres in the resettled communities, Mr Foucher said access to the facilities remains weak. "Even when buildings have been rebuilt, they are not always manned," he said.
A senior fellow at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, Bulama Bukarti, said a lack of sustainable livelihoods for IDPs to meet their basic needs could result in a cycle of dependency that would hinder their ability to integrate into society effectively.
He called for the provision of quality access to social welfare services as well as monitoring and evaluating the measures already taken to see how well they work.
"Regular monitoring and evaluation of the resettlement scheme's progress and impact are crucial. This helps in identifying gaps, assessing the effectiveness of interventions, and making informed adjustments to improve outcomes," he said.
'Government wants to see livelihoods back in the LGAs'
But Governor Zulum's spokesperson, Mr Gusau, insisted that the resettlement exercise prioritises "means of livelihood" and basic amenities for the resettled communities.
He said the government's vision for the exercise was to see that livelihoods are back in the local government areas "because unless you have livelihoods you continue to have a dependency on food aid."
According to him, there are standing committees in each of the resettled areas that monitor and give reports on the progress of livelihood returning to the resettled communities.
He said: "The governor has a way of injecting money into these communities to support people who are willing to do different kinds of businesses. Normally, anytime they settle, there's always a provision for people, for livelihood and then there's a monitoring mechanism of ensuring that this is.
"Recently, the government released 312 tractors that will be given to communities who will form cooperatives among the farmers. The majority of the farmers are IDPs who have been resettled, and the majority of those that will benefit are IDPs who have been relocated and are going back into agriculture," he said.
*This is the first of a two-part report. The report was funded by grants from the Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development
