The international charity, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) otherwise called Doctors without Borders, last week raised the alarm about the spike in severe malnutrition in northern Nigeria.
The International President of MSF, Dr Christos Christou, said at a press briefing in Abuja last Friday that the number of children with severe malnutrition which his organisation handled between January and August this year, was 51 percent more than the number it handled in the equivalent period of 2023.
I don’t know who paid attention, in the pantheon of Nigeria’s officialdom. If anyone did, it must have been because it was the top boss of MSF that spoke. And as I had heard before, protocol requires that certain levels of Nigerian officials should be present at such briefings.
Otherwise, the country representative of MSF, Dr Simba Tirima had raised a more detailed cry early June this year on the same matter. In a publication dated June 5, on the MSF website, Tirima noted that the spike in the number of severely malnourished children in that part of the country in preceding weeks was alarming, and it wasn’t yet July which usually records the highest numbers.
Before the June statement, MSF had raised similar alarms in 2022 and 2023. It attributed the rising malnutrition to conflicts which had dislodged people; climate change, and global food inflation following the COVID 19 pandemic and consequent global shutdown.
Of these three factors identified by MSF, armed conflict is a major driver in the case of northern Nigeria. First was the Boko Haram insurrection which has lasted for some 15 years now. And 13 years ago, bands of freelance killers with no ideology besides securing the good life with the barrels of guns made a forceful entry in the same zone. They were called bandits.
Both insurgents cut for themselves large swathes of land in the north east and north west. Boko Haram is active particularly in Borno State, with a territory that it administers as it deems fit. The bandits run rampage in the north west. They displaced farmers, and those who didn’t run, pay them for access to their own farms. The result has been predictable food shortages and accompanying severe malnutrition.
By the time the malnutrition alarm went off in 2022, the battle for political succession was nearing fever pitch, with the general elections coming up in February 2023. Nobody heard the cry of the children or the cry for them. Babies don’t have voter’s cards, neither can they grab, snatch and run with ballot boxes. As such, they had no electoral value as the 2023 elections would show.
The cry for the children went up again in 2023. But this time, the Bretton Woods twins, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) had Nigeria by the jugular via proxy. The Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP), though without a name this time, had gotten underway. Welfare in any form is a taboo. There must be no subsidy – from fuel to baby food. For a hobbled presidency, when they say, jump, the only reply he is programmed to give is, how high.
We know how it is that when a stranger with dubious wealth asks street boys who could abuse his own mother, the worst of the knaves offers to wax a record singing about his mother’s privates if only to lay his claws on a few currency notes.
The first time they came with the weird theory of macroeconomic balance at whatever cost, there were objectors who challenged their warped dogma. Professor Adebayo Adedeji and his colleagues at the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) challenged the dogma. They argued among other things that the human cost was too high.
My boss then, Ashikiwe Adione-Egom, also wrote against it. From the etymology of economic concepts to their historical applications, hardly anyone could square up with Ashiks as we fondly called him. I picked the thread from him and posed uncomfortable questions to the World Bank representative here then, Linda(?) Okigbo. Yes, from the large Okigbo family where the economist, Dr Pius Okigbo stood out in the 1960s.
Adedeji and Adione-Egom were in the minority that could intelligently challenge the given economic orthodoxy of the West. Dr Kalu Idika Kalu, the finance minister then, led the chorus in defence of SAP. So many Ph.Ds lined up behind him, parroting what they had been taught.
Even though they were few, the anti-SAP argument won at the end of the day, and the programme was remodelled to come up with a so-called SAP with a Human Face. A sprinkling of welfare elements were thrown in to soften the rock-hard concept. That was how the government introduced the Directorate of Foods, Roads and Rural Infrastructure good (DFRRI).
For me, it was a lesson that one mustn’t necessarily be with the majority, whether they make sense or not. The self-evident truth backed up by sufficient espousal of knowledge often trumps the unquestioned given. The lives of millions of babies in Africa were saved between the mid-1990s and this new season of SAP without a name.
So, with Tinubu as the prime apostle of this new SAP, I bet that the statistics of MSF and whoever else cares about Nigeria will keep growing grimmer and grimmer. The books must be the way Washington wants it, even if it means babies starving to death.
But come to think of it, are state governments beholden to Washington too? Can’t they do something? Are they not touched directly by this calamity? Surely, not all relations of the northern governors, their top politicians and top civil servants are rich?
In theory, these northern states, like others, are self-governing. But in reality, they have become appendages of the central government. Their governors live and govern from Abuja. Their farmlands have either been run over or are in danger of being run over. There appears so little that these governments can do under the current situation.
A wonderful exception to this state of affairs, however, is Professor Babagana Zulum, the governor of Borno State. His state is the worst hit by Boko Haram, which occupies territory and levies taxes. Yet, Zulum lives in the state, executing and commissioning projects there. He is among the first persons to visit any territory retaken by Nigerian soldiers and shows empathy to the victims of the mindless violence.
He stands as a tower that other northern governors should emulate. Even if they can’t deploy holistic solutions to this scourge of the innocent, they can set up feeding centres for these malnourished babies as a first step.
