Abuja — "The system is not failing. The problem is it's being asked to replace state functions it was never designed to perform."
The humanitarian crisis in northeast Nigeria is often described in the familiar shorthand of protracted conflict, mass displacement, chronic food insecurity. But this obscures a deeper truth; one that explains why, despite billions of dollars in aid, the situation continues to deteriorate.
Northeast Nigeria is not just a long-running emergency. It is a complex crisis inside a dysfunctional state, where humanitarian outcomes are shaped as much by failures - of governance, security, infrastructure, and socioeconomic systems - as by the violence of Boko Haram and its jihadist cousin, Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP).
And because the humanitarian system is unable to insulate itself from the surrounding dysfunction, these weaknesses seep into every layer of the response. The result is a crisis that is both predictable and persistently unmanageable.
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A humanitarian system stretched to breaking point
In 2025, 7.8 million people in conflict-affected Borno, Adamawa, and Yobe (BAY) states required assistance, including 1.8 million displaced people and 1.4 million returnees. By 2026, 5.9 million were assessed to be in severe to extreme need, with 5.8 million projected to face acute food insecurity during the May-October lean season - up from 4.6 million the year before.
Yet global attention has drifted, funding has fallen, media coverage has dwindled, and the crisis has slipped from political agendas - even as the indicators worsen.
Last year saw renewed jihadist attacks in Borno and areas of Yobe - part of a wider Sahelian trend. The violence monitoring group ACLED recorded 3,897 conflict-related deaths in Borno alone. Aid convoys were being ambushed, farmers killed in their fields, and communities repeatedly displaced.
The World Food Programme warned in late 2025 that rising insecurity was driving a "sharp spike in hunger". Nigeria in 2026 has the world's highest projected number of acutely food-insecure people - nearly 35 million citizens.
There have been additional crises. Floods in 2024 and 2025 destroyed homes and farmland. The collapse of the Alau Dam displaced 400,000 people in Maiduguri alone. Cholera outbreaks followed, with over 14,000 suspected cases nationwide by late 2025, including thousands across the northeast, further compounding the region's humanitarian emergency.
UNICEF, the UN children's agency, warned last year that 400,000 severely malnourished children across the northeast and northwest were not receiving treatment and were at imminent risk. Only emergency donor mobilisation prevented disaster.
This is a crisis accelerating rather than stabilising.
A troubled state at the core of the crisis
Humanitarian narratives often focus on the conflict, displacement, and funding gaps. But these are symptoms, not causes. The deeper problem is that the northeast is embedded in a dysfunctional state system whose weaknesses predate the insurgency and shape every aspect of the response.
Four pillars of dysfunction - governance, security, infrastructure, and socioeconomic fragility - continue to drive suffering and systematically undermine humanitarian effectiveness.
Governance failures
From the inception of the humanitarian response, weak institutions, blurred mandates, unreliable data and chronic corruption defined the operating environment - undermining the aid system's effectiveness.
The absence, for example, of a coherent displacement management framework makes coordination difficult, responsibilities overlap, and people fall through the cracks.
As the administrative capacity of the Nigerian state is weak, it pushes humanitarian agencies into basic government roles such as providing primary healthcare. At the same time, bureaucratic delays slow the customs clearance of lifesaving supplies, and fragile supply chains falter.
Meanwhile corruption - the greatest albatross of the Nigerian state - drains resources, erodes trust, and deprives those in need of assistance.
Security failures
The state's inability to secure territory - in the BAY states and beyond - has created a landscape of constant risk for civilians and relief workers. Aid convoys are vulnerable to ambush, farmers are attacked in their fields, while communities are displaced again and again.
Humanitarian agencies must fund their own protection - armoured vehicles, escorts, hardened compounds (even in Abuja) - which diverts scarce resources away from those in need. As insecurity expands, access contracts, coverage shrinks, response speed slows, putting many more at risk.
Infrastructure deficit
Infrastructure deficits are constraints humanitarian actors cannot work around. Bad roads, destroyed bridges and weak communications make movement slow and predictable, increasing exposure to attack. The destruction of critical infrastructure - in a context where transport systems are limited even in peacetime - continues to shape access and deepen vulnerabilities.
Socioeconomic fragility
This further limits what humanitarian actors can achieve. Pre-existing extreme poverty means aid must be shared with host communities often just as vulnerable as the displaced.
With low literacy a defining characteristic of the BAY states, feedback systems relying on written communication rarely work, and livelihood programmes struggle where educational foundations are so weak. A thin local professional workforce with the language skills needed to engage affected communities limits localisation efforts and long-term sustainability.
The tension between donor funding and programmatic priorities, the coordination gaps, the weak engagement with affected people, and the protractedness of the crisis are the contexts in which humanitarians typically operate the world over.
Yet in Nigeria's case there is the added dimension of structural challenges, which produce three predictable outcomes:
- Coordination failure - weak state institutions make coordination harder. Nigerian Humanitarian Affairs Minister Bernard Doro recently admitted that "longstanding challenges of fragmentation, duplication, and lack of coordination have hindered effective humanitarian response and poverty reduction efforts in Nigeria".
- Operational distortion - local elites and security actors shape access and targeting, which can also include the theft of supplies.
- "Sometimes, [state camp officials and security agents] take those relief materials and mortgage them," a government official told me. "That's when you go to the camps and see something like survival sex. It is not [the women's] intention to have sex for something, but they do it just to have access to food or other amenities."
- Structural constraints - humanitarians cannot rebuild roads, stabilise the currency, or repair education systems - which impacts the success of the aid response.
The system is not failing. The problem is that it's being asked to replace state functions it was never designed to perform.
A crisis at risk of deeper neglect
After 17 years of insurgent conflict, the northeast remains one of Nigeria's most visible humanitarian operations. Yet visibility has not translated into sustained political commitment - either at the local or global level.
The Borno State government, while rightly questioning the dependency aid can breed, is also deeply suspicious of the humanitarian system that does the heavy lifting.
Bureaucratic restrictions and security concerns inhibit humanitarian access, while less pronounced forms of political interference skew decision-making - not always in the best interests of the affected communities.
"I recall in one of the local governments, our women empowerment programme was delayed because the selection process was so politically influenced," an NGO interviewee explained. "I had to cancel it; and starting it all over we lost a few months."
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Such a long-running crisis also generates relief fatigue. By the end of last year, the UN's humanitarian response plan was only 31% funded, while UNICEF faced a 53% finance gap.
That under-resourcing also applies to domestic institutions such as the federal National Emergency Management Agency, the National Commission for Refugees, Migrants and Internally Displaced Persons, and state-level agencies.
The scale of needs continues to rise as operational capacity is stretched ever thinner.
Meanwhile, the lack of investment hampers home-grown durable solutions as donors turn their attention to newer, more urgent crises around the world.
What would it take to change course?
Three shifts are essential:
- Recognise the crisis for what it is - a systemic governance and development failure.
- Rebuild the foundations of state functionality - provide effective governance, security, infrastructure, and public services.
- Protect humanitarian space and funding - before the crisis slips further into neglect.
Northeast Nigeria is a tragedy not simply because it is complex, but because it is structurally constrained. A crisis shaped by insurgency, yes - but equally by the deeper dysfunctions of a state unable to protect, provide, or plan well for its people.
Until Nigeria regains the functionality that defines modern states, the humanitarian response will remain a stopgap - stabilising lives briefly while the multidimensional crisis affecting the lives of so many millions of people continues to expand.
Philip Alesin, Policy and advocacy professional, with a PhD thesis on How State Dysfunction Shapes Humanitarian Effectiveness in Complex Emergencies
