Islamic militants belong to Boko Haram in Nigeria. (Photo: AP)
As many as 75,000 children could die from starvation in a “few months” after the Islamic militant group Boko Haram ravaged a Nigerian province. According to a U.N. official, the threat of famine in the northeastern Borno state proceeds a conflict that left 20,000 people dead and 2.6 million displaced.
President Muhammadu Buhari and the Nigerian military cleared the Islamic militant group from the region, but the insurgency left the province in tatters.
“Our assessment is that 14 million people are identified as in need of humanitarian assistance,” U.N. humanitarian coordinator Peter Lundberg said. That number includes 400,000 children in critical need of assistance, and 75,000 who could die “in [a] few months ahead of us.”
Mr. Lundberg said the crisis was approaching the province at “high speed,” leaving the U.N. attempting to reach half of the 14 million people. That’s a population larger than that of the entire nation of Belgium. He also said the U.N. just does not have the resources to deal with the crisis and is now calling on international partners, while the Nigerian government has agreed to make an effort to reach the rest.
“We need to reach out to the private sector, to the philanthropists in Nigeria,” Lundberg said. “We will ask international partners to step in because we can only solve this situation if we actually join hands.”
