north-east

Weather forecasts suggest Maiduguri and surrounding communities in Borno State, northeastern Nigeria, are set for reduced rainfall in the coming days, offering some relief to a city haunted by last year’s Sept. 10 devastating flood.

The chance of rain, which stood at 74 per cent last week, is expected to drop to 11 per cent today, easing pressure on the city’s fragile drainage systems and flood-prone neighbourhoods. ​According to AccuWeather, scattered showers are still expected, but without the intensity that typically triggers flash floods.

For residents, however, the reassurance is tempered by painful memories. Nearly half of Maiduguri was affected last year, with at least 150 lives lost, according to the National Emergency Management Agency, and over 400,000 people displaced. Critical infrastructure was damaged, livelihoods destroyed, and many survivors are still struggling to recover. 

The improved forecast offers hope, but Maiduguri’s long history of flooding means residents remain wary. Last year’s calamity was not caused solely by rainfall but by inadequate infrastructure, blocked drainage systems, and the dam’s failure. HumAngle reported extensively on the series of events that led to the flood. 

Babagana Zulum, the state governor, who visited the Alau Dam recently, assured residents that water levels are now stable after controlled releases since July.

“Based on current engineering analysis, there is no cause for alarm,” he told journalists.

Yet not everyone is convinced. Timothy Olanrewaju, a resident who was affected by last year’s flood, said the government’s assurance should be taken with a grain of salt.

“We can’t assume that just because the rain is easing compared to last month that we won’t experience flooding,” he said. “Two communities, 505 Housing Estate and Fori Layout, were flooded last weekend, even though there was no heavy rainfall in the city. The Ngada River simply overflowed its banks, and the water made its way into those communities.”

Like many residents, Timothy said he has yet to replace most of the items he lost in the last flood. “Even my car, which was submerged in the water for over a week, is still in terrible shape. I’ve spent a lot of money on it, but it’s not fully repaired,” he said, adding that he is still traumatised. 

“Every time I hear the sound of rain, I start to panic, thinking the flood is coming. A few days ago, I learned that some communities in the city were flooded, and it made me anxious. I began to worry that we would experience the same things we did last year.”

Residents take precaution

In the absence of certainty, some communities are taking matters into their own hands. At the State Low-cost Estate, one of the hardest-hit areas last year, residents have begun desilting their clogged drains during environmental sanitation exercises.

“We were blamed for the flooding we face here because of blocked drainage,” said Abdulkareem Mai Modu, a resident of the estate. “So, in order not to take any chances, we decided to pool our resources and clear all our waterways to avoid any disaster.”

Others, like automobile mechanic Yahaya Garba, remain displaced. ​“We are still taking temporary abodes at the homes of our relatives. I hope there will be a permanent solution to this annual calamity that comes to our homes,” he said. Yahaya’s home in Bulunkutu is still submerged from the recent excessive rainfall.

In the 505 Housing Estate, where floodwaters recently breached perimeter fences, resident Babagana Wakil described wading through knee-deep water.

​“Many residents to relocate as quickly as possible,” he said.

“The government needs to step up and ensure they monitor the flow of water and, when they see danger, pass on information to residents as quickly as possible so people can evacuate from flood-prone areas,” Timothy added.

Nearly two months after being resettled to rebuild their lives following several years of displacement, residents of Darajamal have suffered a devastating Boko Haram attack that left at least 63 people dead, including five soldiers, according to data from local authorities and sources who spoke to HumAngle.

The assault began on Friday night, Sept. 5, when the terrorists stormed the rural community in Bama Local Government Area, Borno State, in Nigeria’s North East. Modu Gujja, the area council chairman, said the terrorists arrived around 9 p.m., opened fire, and set homes ablaze. At least 24 houses were destroyed.

In the wake of the Boko Haram insurgency over a decade ago, Darajamal became a stronghold for the terrorists and remained deserted for years, even after the military recaptured it in ruins. On July 13, the Borno State government resettled more than 3000 displaced persons from an IDP camp in Bama town into 300 newly constructed housing units in the community.

The recent attack has shattered fragile hopes of stability; it has led to a fresh displacement of about 108 households, according to Gujja. 

Borno State Governor Babagana Umara Zulum, who visited the community on Saturday, Sept. 6, confirmed the death toll and the displacement figures. Standing before the remaining residents, he described the incident as “very sad” and a “major setback” for resettlement efforts.

“We are here to commiserate with the people of Darajamal […] This community was settled a few months ago, and they go about their normal activities, but unfortunately, they experienced a Boko Haram attack last night,” Zulum said. 

For residents, the tragedy is a cruel repetition. Kaana Ali, a resident of the village, told journalists that he had resolved to leave for good after losing close family friends, though the governor appealed for him and others to stay. “The governor is still begging us to stay back as more protection would be provided to secure our community,” he said.

Zulum acknowledged the limits of the military’s capacity to secure all vulnerable communities: “We have to take note that the numerical strength of the military is not enough to cover everywhere, so far so good, two sets of Forest Guards have been trained, therefore one of the solutions that we need to implement immediately is to deploy the trained Forest Guards to most of the locations that are vulnerable, they will protect the forest and communities.”

The attack also drew condemnation from Kaka Shehu, who represents the Borno Central senatorial district, which includes Darajamal. He described the killings as a crime against humanity and pledged legislative support for restoring peace in the state.

The massacre in Darajamal comes only a month after Boko Haram struck Kirawa, another resettled border town in neighbouring Gwoza Local Government Area. That attack killed at least four people, displaced hundreds, led to the abduction of a schoolgirl, and left homes, vehicles, and food supplies destroyed. 

In the aftermath, locals in Kirawa told HumAngle that no Nigerian military or Multinational Joint Task Force reinforcements had returned to the community, leaving it without security. Many residents fled across the border into Cameroon, surviving nights in makeshift shelters or the open air before cautiously returning during the day.

The back-to-back attacks underscore the continuing presence of Boko Haram across Borno’s rural communities and highlight the persistent risks undermining the state’s resettlement programmes. Since the start of 2025, multiple repatriated communities have faced renewed violence, leaving many families once again displaced, grieving, and uncertain of the future.

VOV 128: When the Caretakers are Gone | RSS.com

You flee for your life when Boko Haram attacks your hometown in Adamawa, northeastern Nigeria. By the time you return, a neighbour had already begun building on your family compound.

When you protest, he bribes the authorities and dismisses you, telling you that you have no one to inherit the home. Your son, who used to be your main caretaker, went missing during the war, and you have not heard from him since.

Which weighs more heavily: grieving a missing loved one without knowing if he is alive or dead, or facing daily struggles that come with losing your caretaker? Either way, the consequences are crushing. So how do you cope with grief, poverty, and injustice, all at once?

Reported and scripted by Sabiqah Bello

Voice acting by Rukayya Saeed

Multimedia editor is Anthony Asemota

Executive producer is Ahmad Salkida

When Ruth Adamu finds her son, Hikame, he is in school. She walks down its corridors to find him, takes his hand, and tells him to come with her. She promises to buy him a new pair of shoes, and together, they head towards the gate. 

But just as they are about to leave, he pulls away and says, “Mummy, I’m coming,” before turning back inside. As he wanders off, she begins to worry he might get lost or go missing, and panic sets in. 

This is how her dreams about the boy go. 

Other times, when he appears in her dream, he tells her he is going to school, and she urges him to stay home. She reminds him that school is almost closing, and that he can go when it opens again.

The last time she dreamt of him, he asked her to be patient as he was going to meet “them.” In other dreams, he confides that he is afraid of the people he is with. 

Whenever she wakes up from such visions, she slips into despair so deep it ruins her day and leaves her unable to do anything at all. She agonises over what state he might be in and wonders whether he has been radicalised by Boko Haram, the terrorist group in whose hands her son fell in 2014 as they fought to establish a radical Islamic state. 

“I know they won’t be easy on him. If he’s alive, they’ll definitely train him,“ she says, and that thought makes her heart ache.

Ruth was a 48-year-old mother of five in 2013 when her husband was killed by Boko Haram. She was surprised by how much her youngest child, 11-year-old Hikame, brought her comfort in her grief. Whenever she appeared to be sad or lost in thought, he would run to her and shout, “Mummy! Mummy! What is it? Come with me, let me show you something,” and then he’d engage her in a way that lifted her out of that heavy, sorrowful mood.

“He was very caring and very obedient,” she reminisces. “He never wanted, or allowed himself to see me worried or alone.”

When she headed out to sell eggs, he would drop whatever he was doing, even a game of football, and run to her, saying, “Mummy, let me come with you.” She would tell him it was fine and that he should go play, but he always insisted. 

He would accompany her, help with the sales, return home, and then assist with chores. Only after making sure everything was done would he ask, “Mummy, there’s nothing else, right?” Then, and only then, would he finally go off to play.

Hikame loved pigeons. He saved some money and asked his mother to help him cover the rest so he could buy one. A cage was built for it, and he delighted in feeding and caring for his new bird. Soon, Ruth grew an interest in the joys of pigeon-rearing as well. 

Ruth was separated from Hikame when he was 12 years and 10 days old. She remembers precisely that it was October 30, 2014. On that day, the town of Mubi, in Nigeria’s northeastern Adamawa State, came under attack by Boko Haram, which had declared war on the Nigerian state. 

That morning, she had started the generator to pump water into her fish pond. The sound kept her from hearing the chaos until her children came running to warn her. When she turned it off, the gunfire became loud, and she looked up to see an aeroplane firing downwards. 

She took all her children in the car and fled. They spent the night in the bush before proceeding at dusk, only stopping to ask for directions. A group of people by the roadside told her it was safe enough to drive on the main road, as the terrorists were already in Mubi, so she was unlikely to encounter them. Just then, a car passed by, and she was confident to follow suit.

“What I didn’t know was that it was a Boko Haram vehicle. When we reached a checkpoint manned by the terrorists, it was allowed to pass, but I was asked to stop,” she narrated.

Ruth, her children, and the three other people she had kindly given a ride obeyed the commands they were given. She handed over her keys to the gun-wielding terrorists who surrounded them, one from the front and another from behind. 

“The man in front turned to the other and asked, ‘What do we do with these ones who have obeyed us?’ The other stayed silent at first, then turned to me. ‘Madam, are all these your children?’ he asked. ‘No,’ I replied. He paused before saying, ‘All of you may go, except these two young men [Hikame and one of the passengers she had given a lift].’”

Ruth immediately fell to her knees and cupped her palms in an attempt to plead, but even before the words left her mouth, the terrorist violently cocked his gun and told her to get out of his sight. Her daughter dragged her away. 

They found a spot nearby, sat and waited for him to change his mind, or for his associates to convince him to let them go, or maybe for some miracle to happen where she could walk away with all her children. After waiting for what felt like too long, her daughter convinced her that it was time to move forward. Reluctantly, she left Hikame behind. 

When they reached the next safe town, she got a phone and called her eldest son and told him to try contacting Hikame. After several attempts, he spoke to his brother and told him to run whenever he got a chance. He warned him not to stay with the terrorists or listen to anything they preached to him. Then he emphasised, again, that he must run away. 

Whether Hikame got a chance to do so is still a mystery to his family 11 years later. They have never heard from him since that call. His number stopped going through, although tracking showed that he was around Bama, in Borno, northeastern Nigeria. Ruth went to the police station and declared her son missing. She did the same with the Nigerian Army, too, and finally, with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

“The ICRC were the one who truly cared,” Ruth says. “I gave them Hikame’s details, and we’ve stayed in touch for about eight or nine years. At first, they often called to ask if I had heard anything about him. But those calls upset me badly. I would tremble, feel anxious. Talking about him was too painful, so I asked them to stop calling,” she explains. 

One time when they called, she broke down, shouting, crying, her head aching. Then one staff member consoled her softly. He told her that he, too, had been a victim. He offered words that soothed her and gave her strength and a renewed sense of hope. He also told her about a programme for the family of the missing she could join, promising that if she tried it and didn’t like it, she could leave whenever she wished.

“That programme helped me so much. It taught me resilience, how to manage my emotions, and gave me counselling. I used to isolate myself, but now I socialise more. We sit together as a family in the programme, they support us, even with transport fares, and they empower us. I’ve also built friendships there, and we visit and strengthen each other,” she says.

The International Committee of the Red Cross has registered at least 25,000 missing people in Nigeria since 2015, with over 14,000 of them being children.  

The protracted insurgency in the country’s North East has fueled a massive missing person problem across the region. Some vanish while fleeing violence, others are captured by terrorist groups, and many civilians are arbitrarily detained by the army, unable to distinguish terrorists from innocent people. 

An investigation by HumAngle revealed the devastating scale of the issue, documenting mass killings and mass graves. For families, the emotional toll is immense as they wait for news, grieve without bodies, and face practical challenges like inheritance disputes, as missing loved ones are not legally declared dead. Women wait years for their husbands, and children grow up with unanswered questions about their parents or siblings.

The ICRC started an Accompaniment Programme in 2019, which offers families of the missing emotional, economic, legal, and psychosocial support, helping them find hope and resilience.

It is the same programme that Ruth participated in. It has provided her with a support system, she says, as those who go through it have formed an organisation. They visit one another, pray together, and contribute small amounts of money to support each other during emergencies or special occasions, like weddings. It gives Ruth strength and comfort.

She says she no longer wallows in her grief for long periods of time. She doesn’t cry as frequently or avoid social interactions anymore. Talking about Hikame has also gotten easier, and the panic attacks don’t happen when she is asked about him. 

However, Ruth still believes that her body has suffered the consequences of grief and left scars that aren’t easily seen.

“Like my eyes,” she says. “I no longer see well with them, and I know it’s how much I cry that has affected it. It became so bad that I couldn’t step outside of my room into the light at some point. It hurt to look at the light. My legs also hurt, and I’m not as active as I used to be.”

When Ruth stands up, it is slightly laboured. She disappears into her room and reappears with two photos of Hikame in her hands. In one, he’s wearing a blue and yellow graduation gown and hat. There are other students in the background wearing school uniforms. 

Hikame will turn 23 on October 20 this year. If he were safe with his family, he would have worn a similar gown about three more times by now: once for his secondary school graduation, again for his university matriculation, and later for his convocation. 

Perhaps this picture is one that conjures up her frequent dreams of him in a school setting. 

In grief psychology, there’s a concept called continuing bonds. It refers to the way people hold on to memories, thoughts, or moments with loved ones who have passed or gone missing, sometimes even dreaming about them. “This is seen as part of healing, helping them cope with loss. In Ruth’s case, dreaming of her son in a school setting likely shows how important those school memories were to both of them,” Chioma Onyemaobi, a licensed clinical psychologist, explains.

Now 60, Ruth lives with her teenage granddaughter, who she says has helped in engaging her so that she doesn’t fall into despair again. The girl reminds her of Hikame and how he did the same for her when she was grieving her husband. 

If grief, as they say, is love that has nowhere to go, then while nothing can replace Ruth’s love for Hikame, she channels it into her granddaughter, all the while holding onto hope for a reunion with her son.

She no longer runs her fishery or egg businesses, partly because the war took everything from her and forced her to rebuild from scratch, and partly because the weight of grief has drained her strength. 

Now she buys wholesale rice, shares it among retailers, and earns a commission from their sales.

There’s one more thing Ruth does. One more place she channels love into: the rearing of pigeons. 

“To this day, I make sure I never stop caring for pigeons,” Ruth says, and a teardrop escapes her eyes. She blinks. “I rear some even now, and every time I feed them, I think of Hikame.” 

The Namnai River has become a graveyard. Where an old bridge once carried farmers, traders, and travellers across with ease, fragile boats now wobble under desperate crowds. Each crossing is a risk, and for three members of Badaru Badawi’s family, that risk ended in death.

That evening on July 25, Bara’atu Bala, Yusuf Badawi, a heavily pregnant Aisha Rilwanu, two other relatives of theirs, alongside other travellers, paid ₦500 each to board a locally made boat at the Namnai river bank in Gassol Local Government Area, Taraba State, in northeastern Nigeria. 

Midway across, the boat capsized. Some passengers struggled to get ashore, but Bara’atu, Yusuf, and Aisha never made it. They drowned in the river. 

For Badaru, the grief is unrelenting. All three were close to him: Yusuf, his son; Bara’atu, his elder sister; and Aisha, his sister-in-law. 

His wife and mother survived the accident by swimming to safety. But his family’s search for the missing three lasted all night, combing the waters by canoe. By dawn, they recovered only Bara’atu’s body. To this day, Yusuf and Aisha remain unaccounted for.

“Even if they were destined to die that day, it shouldn’t have been through such a means,” he told HumAngle. 

Their loss is part of a wider tragedy that began a year earlier, when the Namnai bridge collapsed after torrential flooding. Since then, the community has been forced to rely on makeshift ferries, canoes, and fragile boats. Accidents have become routine, claiming lives and wrecking livelihoods.

HumAngle learnt that these crossings have led to recurring mishaps, claiming lives and destroying property valued in the hundreds of thousands of naira.

“Most of the mishaps were due to overcrowding in the boats. Apart from the properties that were lost, people also lost their lives,” Ibrahim Isa, a boat operator in the community, said. 

A vital link broken

Until August 2024, the Namnai bridge was a major transit route connecting Taraba to other parts of the North East, North Central, and the country’s South. Farmers used it to reach their fields, traders to sell their goods, and commuters to travel for work and family. Its sudden collapse severed all of that. 

“We have a waterfall around the area, which usually empties itself into the river. I think the water flow was so intense that day, and coupled with the flood, the river could not contain it, so the bridge broke,” Ibrahim recounted. “When the bridge broke, livelihood came to a standstill because people could no longer access their farms or the market for days.”

In the days that followed, residents were stranded. Those with canoes on the River Benue quickly brought them to Namnai, offering a temporary solution. But demand soon overwhelmed supply. With only two motorboats and a handful of canoes available, passengers waited anxiously, scrambled for places, or boarded the overcrowded ones.

Ibrahim had started working as a boat operator since the collapse of the bridge, drawing on his experience in rowing. “We started using the canoes to help people and their belongings cross to the other side before one member from the house of representatives representing our constituents brought a boat, and a week later, a senator deployed another boat to the riverbank,” he said.   

“Boats and canoes were never designed to carry large crowds or heavy loads, but people were desperate to access farm lands, markets, and places of work,” Ibrahim noted. 

He further explained that as the mishaps reoccurred, people started abandoning their farms due to fear. Traders could no longer cross to the other side to buy and sell, and the flow of goods into Namnai slowed. 

“The situation impacted the community and its environs negatively, especially traders and farmers,” Ibrahim emphasised, adding that the prices of food items in the community have gone up since then. 

Unfulfilled promises

In November 2024, after the floodwaters receded, Agbu Kefas, the Taraba State governor, visited the site to assess the damage. 

“He assured us that they were going to fix the bridge. He even promised to expand the bridge, saying that money would be approved soon,” Ibrahim said. 

But nearly a year later, nothing has changed. Commuters continue to take the risk through fragile canoes and small boats to reach their destination. 

For others, it is an opportunity to make money, as commercial boat operators have deployed locally-made ferries that carry both vehicles and passengers at the riverbank. 

“They charge between ₦3,000 and ₦4,000 per car, depending on its size, and ₦500 per passenger,” Ibrahim said. This means anyone crossing with a vehicle pays a total of ₦6,000 to ₦8,000 for a round trip. 

As one of the boat operators, he said they sometimes take pity on residents who cannot afford the full fare, accepting as little as ₦300 or even ₦200.

In April 2025, Uba Maigari, Minister of State for Regional Development, announced that the federal government had listed the Namnai bridge among eleven slated for repair in the North East, assuring that “in a week” the bridge will be fixed. 

Residents’ hopes were briefly reignited, but work has yet to begin. 

Meanwhile, each rainy season makes crossings deadlier. Cars ferried across, sometimes sinking into the swollen waters.

‘We are waiting’

On Aug. 18, tragedy struck again. A commercial bus operated by the Adamawa Express transport agency plunged into the Namnai River while attempting to cross the collapsed bridge. Several lives and properties were lost, reinforcing fears that the broken crossing remains a constant danger.

For Badaru, whose family is still grieving, the government’s inaction is unbearable. “I  don’t think I have to call on the government. They swore an oath after assuming office to cater to the people, so I’m sure they know their duties to the people. I don’t think we have to beg them when it comes to matters like this,” he said, sounding frustrated. 

Ibrahim, too, is losing faith. “People from [nearby] Ardo Karla used to farm in Namnai, but since the bridge broke, some people abandoned their farms. I know someone who vowed never to set foot on his farm since the bridge broke because of the tussle of going back and forth on water that is unsafe,” Ibrahim said, adding that the community recently learnt that the Federal Executive Council has approved the repair of the bridge.

 “We are still waiting for it to commence,” he said.  

As residents wait for bulldozers and builders, Badaru continues to search for the bodies of his son and sister-in-law. He admits, however, that he may one day have to surrender to fate.

Mallam Abakar and his two sons leave their home in Gyawana, Lamurde Local Government Area of Adamawa State, northeastern Nigeria, at 5 a.m. every weekday. Thirty minutes later, they arrive at the farm, and each one of them takes a position.

Five-year-old Isiaka sits at the entrance, guarding a wide bed of ripening rice. His older brother, Abu, stays in the opposite direction. Their father settles near their makeshift shelter, his gaze sweeping across the entire field. 

Isiaka and Abu clutch pieces of zinc and wooden sticks to make a sound. Day after day, the boys repeat this routine, standing guard over their father’s rice field as if it were a battlefield.

By 6 a.m., the team is on high alert. As the father patrols the edges of the field, the boys pound their gongs and shout fiercely, driving away swarms of quelea birds before they can descend.

The quelea species native to sub-Saharan Africa is the most numerous bird species in the world, with a peak post-breeding population estimated at 1.5 billion, according to the Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International. Known as the red-billed quelea, this small weaver bird is notorious for its attacks on small-grain crops. It is a major pest throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa and can cause significant economic losses.

Across Nigeria, the recurring quela bird invasion of rice farms remains a great challenge to farmers, especially those in Adamawa, Taraba, Sokoto, Jigawa, and Yobe. The invasion is noted as one of the reasons driving food shortages in these regions, as the dangerous parasites are capable of wiping out hectares in minutes during every invasion.

The family that watches

Mallam Abakar has been cultivating rice for more than a decade. Apart from the recurring flood, farmer-herder clashes, another challenge he faces in the region is quelea bird invasions. 

The first major invasion in Adamawa State was reported in 2016, when the birds swept through 12 council areas, destroying crops worth millions of naira. Since then, the birds have repeatedly unleashed large-scale devastation, pushing rice farmers in the region into crippling losses.

“The birds come every year. In the last few years, we noticed a decline in their invasions, but this year, they are back with full force,” Abakar said. 

HumAngle gathered that the birds usually appear at the end of July and stay until October. As early as 6 a.m., they start hovering above the fields, attempting to descend, prompting farmers to chase them away in an effort to protect their crops. 

The birds are scarcely seen in the afternoon, as they retreat to nearby sugar cane plantations for rest. However, around 5 p.m., they re-emerge in their thousands, and farmers resume their vigilant watch. 

Local farmers say the birds are highly sensitive to sound, often targeting unguarded farms. 

Flying in a swarm of thousands, they descend, settle, and can strip a hectare of rice in minutes. The birds are attracted to mostly rice fields, especially those nearing maturity. They feed by sucking out the milky sap from developing grains or plucking out fully ripened seeds. In addition to feeding damage, their rapid wingbeats shake the plants, causing seedlings and grains to fall to the ground.

To keep them away, the farmers patrol their farms, and since they can’t be everywhere at once, they set up dummies to create the illusion of a human presence. Sometimes they tie strips of leather or plastic across the farms. When the wind blows, the strips flutter and mimic movement, which discourages the birds from descending. Farmers also hit gongs to scare the swarms away or alert neighbouring farms that the birds are on the move. 

Mallam Abakar said he and his children only rest when the birds leave the fields in the afternoon. The family has set up a small tent on the farm, where they take shelter from the scorching sun. There, they pray and share meals before returning to their watch. 

Shaking his head repeatedly, Abakar told HumAngle, “It’s draining. Imagine doing this every day before harvest. We get tired, and sometimes it feels like we should just let them be.”

However, he cannot ignore the birds, as he is a full-time farmer who relies on his farm yields to cater for his family. In a good year, he usually harvests around 20 bags of rice or more. However, in recent times, he has endured repeated tussles with the birds.

“There was a certain year they wiped off my entire rice field,” Abakar recounted. “It was devastating, and since then, I’ve been on guard.”

It was after the birds wiped off his rice fields that he started bringing his children to the farm to assist in scaring the birds away. 

“We don’t wait for them to attack before we start defending,” Abakar said. 

Tiny birds, huge losses 

Bernard Ramson, a 40-year-old rice farmer in the region, who also works as a private security guard, told HumAngle that the quelea bird invasion on his farm left him depressed. He started farming in the region last year and enjoyed a bountiful harvest in April after taking part in irrigation.

“We started sighting the birds around July, and by August, their numbers tripled,” he said. 

For months, Bernard tended to his rice farm, applying pesticides and weeding by hand. With less than a month to harvest, he was counting down until he arrived at his rice field one morning to find it destroyed. The birds had drained the milky sap from the ripening rice, leaving behind husks and wasted seeds. 

“I was expecting over 20 bags of rice, but I ended up with half a bag. I was so disturbed to the extent that I was bedridden for days,” he said. 

Bernard has not returned to the farm since the incident. He said the sight of the farm devastates him, and the loss has even disrupted his work routine, making him unable to cope. 

He attributes the loss to his tight schedule. “Farmers who can’t wait all day hire people to watch their farms 24/7 and scare the birds away, but as a security guard who shuffles between work and farming, I wasn’t always available, so the birds took advantage of my absence and wreaked havoc on my farm,” Bernard said.  

While they also damage guinea corn farms, he said, rice farmers suffer the most severe losses.

“I’ve seen people hitting gongs and walking around their farms. Others spread nets on the farm to trap the birds, but even that is not sufficient because some of them end up escaping from the net,” he said. While he is still grappling with the loss, he intends to resume farming next year, and this time, he said, he’d be prepared. 

HumAngle spoke to some farmers in Garin Overseer, another community battling with the invasions in the Lamurde Local Government of Adamawa State. 

Richard Pwanidi, a 35-year-old who inherited his father’s farmland, has erected a makeshift shelter on the farm. There, he and his brothers take turns warding off the quelea birds in the night. He had lost a significant portion of his rice crop to their invasion. 

Richard said that though all mechanisms were in place to drive the birds away, the invasion had cost him a lot. 

HumAngle observed leather strips tied around his farm, dummies placed in front of each rice bed, and his brothers constantly patrolling the fields, creating the impression of human movement. These strategies are similar to the ones adopted by other farmers in the area. 

“We beat drums, we screamed when we saw them approaching, but it seems they were already used to it, because despite the effort, they flew into my farm, descended, and did their thing,” Richard said.  

He lost three beds of rice to the birds, as did his brother on the same day. 

Richard is currently carrying out an early harvest due to the invasion. Even though his rice crops require a week or more to fully ripen, he said he’d rather harvest them now than lose everything to the birds. 

According to Richard, farmers in the region are tired. “We are not talking about five or ten thousand of them. We are talking about thirty thousand and above, descending at once,” he said. 

‘Overlapping schedules’

After witnessing the devastation, HumAngle consulted Bethel Clement, a conservation biology scholar at the A.P. Leventis Ornithological Research Institute, University of Jos, Plateau State, on why the invasion persists. “The issue continues because farming schedules overlap with Quelea migration. Altering rice production timing to avoid this overlap could drastically reduce damage, though local constraints such as water availability may limit such flexibility,” he said. 

The conservation biologist also said that while chemical spraying is widely used, it harms ecosystems and is unsustainable. He recommended more integrated measures, including synchronised planting and early harvesting, organised community bird-scaring, habitat management to reduce roosting near farms, and encouraging natural predators such as kestrels and owls through nest boxes and perches. These approaches, he said, balance food security with environmental protection and offer farmers long-term resilience.

‘We need help’

In 2020, the sum of  ₦13 billion was approved by the Federal Government to tackle the quelea bird and other pest invasions across 12 affected states in Nigeria, including Adamawa, Bauchi, Borno, Kebbi, Sokoto, and Taraba. Four years later, the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development flagged off the project in Kebbi. However, the affected farmers in Adamawa who spoke to HumAngle said they have yet to benefit from the intervention.

“I’ve been farming rice in this region with my late father since I was a boy, and I’ve never witnessed any aerial spray of chemicals facilitated by the government. We heard that money was approved by the government for aerial spraying, but we’ve not seen it so far,” Richard said. 

He added that the only support they received was from Savannah Sugar, a private company that sprayed chemicals around farms in Gyawana, Garin Overseer, Opalo, and other areas, approximately ten years ago. “[After the company spread the chemical, the birds vanished for like three years before they returned,” Richard added.

HumAngle contacted the office of the Adamawa State Commissioner for Agriculture and Rural Development for comments on the state government’s planned response to the invasion, if any, but received no reply at press time. 

Richard believes government intervention could prevent further losses. 

“We need help,” the farmer said. 

On Aug. 16, Nigeria’s National Security Adviser (NSA), Nuhu Ribadu, announced that security services had captured two terror leaders, including Mahmud Muhammad Usman, described as a leader of the al-Qaida-linked faction Jama’atu Ansarul Muslimina fi Biladis Sudan, popularly known as Ansaru. Authorities also said they had detained Mahmud al-Nigeri, who is associated with the emergent Mahmuda network in North Central Nigeria. 

The arrests, made during operations that spanned May to July this year, were described by the NSA as “the most decisive blow against Ansaru” since its inception, with officials hinting that digital material seized could unlock additional cells and enable follow-on arrests. 

“These two men have jointly spearheaded multiple attacks on civilians, security forces and critical national infrastructure. They are currently in custody and will face due legal process,” Ribadu noted.

For a government under pressure to tame overlapping threats from terrorists, this is a political and operational win. The harder question is whether it marks an actual turning point in a fragmented conflict that has repeatedly adapted to leadership losses. 

A short history of a long problem

Ansaru emerged publicly in early 2012 as a breakaway from Boko Haram after years of quiet cross-border travel, training, and ideological cross-pollination with al-Qaida affiliates. 

The split reflected disagreements over targeting and ideological tactics. While Boko Haram, under Abubakar Shekau, embraced mass-casualty violence, including suicide attacks that killed several civilians, including Muslims, Ansaru positioned itself as a more “discriminating” outfit, focused on Western and high-profile Nigerian targets and on hostage-taking for leverage. 

The group’s founders, notably Khalid al-Barnawi and Abubakar Adam Kambar, had networks developed through al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which shaped their doctrine and operational tactics. This lineage remains crucial for understanding Ansaru’s strategic choices and its enduring connections in the Sahel. 

Ansaru’s first phase was brief but consequential. Between late 2012 and early 2013, the group was credibly linked to a string of operations: the storming of a detention site in Abuja, the country’s capital city, on November 2012, the attack on a Nigerian convoy bound for Mali in January 2013, and, most notoriously, the 2013 kidnapping of seven expatriate workers from a Setraco construction camp in Jama’are, Bauchi State in the country’s North East. The hostages were later killed, and Ansaru circulated a proof-of-death video that stunned Nigeria’s security community. 

Those incidents cemented the group’s image as an al-Qaida-influenced kidnap-and-assault specialist rather than a proto-governance insurgency. 

Two leadership shocks then disrupted Ansaru’s momentum. In 2012, Abubakar Adam Kambar, the group’s first commander, was reported killed during a security operation, elevating Khalid Barnawi’s importance inside the network. 

In April 2016, security forces arrested Khalid al-Barnawi in Lokoja, Kogi State, in the North Central, an event that was widely seen as decapitating Ansaru’s remaining central structure. Ansaru then disappeared from public claim streams for several years after that arrest, an action that suggested the group’s command and control was genuinely degraded. 

However, in January 2020, Ansaru reappeared with an ambush on the convoy of the Emir of Potiskum as it transited through Kaduna State in the North West. Later that year, it issued additional claims in the same region, signalling a pivot from its northeastern birthplace toward spaces where state presence was thinner and terror violence had created both a security vacuum and a recruitment market. 

Reports, including one published by HumAngle, traced some of this revival to the group’s continued ties with al-Qaida affiliates in the Sahel and pragmatic cohabitation with terror gangs, whether through facilitation, training, or weapons flows. 

Why the recent arrests matter

The recent arrests resemble earlier moments when big names like Abubakar Adam Kambar were taken off the battlefield. Officials say Mahmud Muhammad Usman and his counterpart from the Mahmuda network were not only operational leaders but also brokers of transnational connections, including alleged roles in orchestrating the 2022 Kuje prison break and in a 2013 attack against a Nigerien uranium site.

“Malam Mamuda, was said to have trained in Libya between 2013 and 2015 under foreign jihadist instructors from Egypt, Tunisia, and Algeria, specialising in weapons handling and Improvised Explosive Device (IED) fabrication,” Ribadu said

Those claims serve a dual purpose. They frame the detentions as part of a campaign that reaches beyond Nigeria’s borders, and they signal to international partners that Abuja is aligning against a regional terrorist web that spans from Northern Nigeria through Niger and into Mali and Burkina Faso. 

The tactical benefits are clearer. Removing senior fixers disrupts the flow of money, weapons, and specialised expertise that enable small cadres to punch above their numerical weight.

The haul of digital media, if exploited quickly, can reveal safe-route maps, dead-drop protocols, and liaisons inside other terror syndicates that lease out men and terrain in north-west and north-central Nigeria. When combined with focused policing in towns and market hubs, that intelligence can shrink Ansaru’s margins for clandestine movement and fundraising. 

None of this ends the threat on its own, but it changes the tempo and increases the cost to operate.

What is Ansaru, and what is it not?

To understand fully what this moment means, it is useful to situate Ansaru among the three principal jihadist currents that affect Nigeria today: Boko Haram’s Jama’atu Ahlis-Sunna lid-Da‘wa wal-Jihad (often called “JAS” or “Shekau’s faction”), the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), and Ansaru itself.

JAS was, for years, the most visible face of the insurgency, built around an absolutist and takfiri reading of Salafi-Jihadism, and operationalised through terror attacks that did not distinguish Muslim civilians from security targets. The Shekau era normalised female suicide bombers, mass abductions, and village-level depopulation. Governance was secondary to spectacle and intimidation. Since Shekau died in 2021, JAS has splintered and receded in some arenas, although pockets remain capable of lethal violence. 

ISWAP is different. Born of a schism with Shekau, it has tended to emphasise territorial management in the Lake Chad Basin, with taxation, shadow court systems, and calibrated violence designed, at least nominally, to avoid indiscriminate Muslim casualties. Its commanders often court pragmatic relationships with traders and smugglers, and, unlike JAS in its prime, ISWAP markets itself as predictable enough for civilians to bargain with and understand. International Crisis Group and other researchers have long highlighted these governance motifs as operational advantages, even as ISWAP continues to attack military positions and abduct civilians. 

Ansaru occupies a third lane. Its al-Qaida genealogy predisposes it toward targeted kidnappings of foreigners and high-profile Nigerians, ambushes of convoys, and the cultivation of rural social capital.

During its 2020 and 2022 push in the North West, Ansaru proselytisers distributed food and farm inputs, positioned themselves as protectors against predatory terrorists, and sought to embed preachers who preached against secular politics and democratic participation. This hearts-and-minds approach was less about running a taxation state and more about building safe communities of sympathy to hide in, recruit from, and extract logistics support. 

Ideologically, Ansaru’s guides are AQIM and, by extension, JNIM in the Sahel. That lineage favours calibrated violence, prolonged detentions rather than mass executions, and strategic hostage bargaining, as seen in the Setraco case and other high-profile kidnappings from 2012 to 2013. It also means Ansaru is plugged into the Sahelian marketplace for weapons, trainers, and media distribution, which helps explain its periodic ability to rebound after leadership losses. 

A map of influence, not of control

In the North East, ISWAP and residual JAS cells dominate the insurgent landscape. Ansaru’s post-2019 story unfolded more in Kaduna’s rural west and parts of neighbouring states, where the absence of policing and the rise of kidnap-for-ransom gangs created both a protection racket and an opportunity for ideological entrepreneurs. 

Birnin Gwari Local Government Area in Kaduna State became a shorthand for that nexus. Residents and local leaders reported that Ansaru courted communities, fought some local terrorist groups, and tried to regulate flows on key feeder roads. 

Media and civil society reports described the group distributing Sallah gifts in Kuyello and influencing daily life in and around Damari and other settlements. These were snapshots of temporary influence, not evidence of continuous territorial control, but they were a warning sign that non-state governance was thickening in spaces where the state was thin. 

That is the context in which Ribadu’s announcement landed. If the commanders arrested were connective tissue between al-Qaida-adjacent logisticians, local fixers, and local terrorist entrepreneurs, then removing them will reverberate in Birnin Gwari and similar corridors. It is also why the arrests were paired rhetorically with claims about plots and partnerships far from Kaduna, including across the Maghreb and the Sahel. 

The Federal Government wants Nigerians to see Ansaru not as another rural gang, but as a node in a continental web that justifies sustained, internationally backed counterterrorism.

Lessons from 2012 and 2016

This is not Nigeria’s first experience with decapitation strikes against Ansaru. In 2012, the reported killing of Kambar set off internal adjustments. 

In 2016, the arrest of Khalid al-Barnawi appeared to shutter Ansaru’s media pipeline and disrupt its external ties, which supports the argument that leadership matters for a relatively small, networked faction. 

Yet by 2020, the group was reclaiming relevance in the northwest, an adaptation that coincided with the Sahel’s worsening jihadist crisis and the metastasis of rural banditry inside Nigeria. 

This short history suggests a dual lesson: Taking leaders off the board works, especially when accompanied by seizures of communications and couriers.  However, it works less well when ungoverned spaces expand faster than the state can fill them and when adjacent theatres, like Mali and Burkina Faso, are producing more seasoned cadres than the region can absorb.

Operations that shaped Ansaru

Ansaru’s brand was shaped by a handful of headline incidents:

Kidnapping and killing of foreign construction workers, Jama’are, Bauchi State, February–March 2013. Seven expatriates seized from Setraco’s compound were later executed after a period of captivity. The case demonstrated Ansaru’s preference for hostage taking aimed at political signalling and bargaining leverage, even if the outcome was ultimately murderous. 

Attack on Nigerian troops en route to Mali, Kogi State, January 2013. As Abuja prepared to contribute forces to the international intervention against jihadists in northern Mali, Ansaru claimed a lethal ambush that underlined its Sahel-centric framing and its willingness to hit military targets to deter Nigeria’s regional role. 

A cluster of 2012 operations, including an assault on a detention facility in Abuja and kidnappings such as the abduction of a French national. The pattern resembled AQIM’s repertoire in the Sahel more than Boko Haram’s campaign in Borno, with a focus on foreigners, convoys, and facilities that maximised international attention. 

More recently, investigators and journalists have traced Ansaru’s fingerprints to influence activities in Kaduna’s rural belt, including the deployment of preachers, gift distribution to farmers, and cooperation or competition with bandit factions. Even where attribution is contested, the persistence of these reports speaks to Ansaru’s hybrid strategy of armed proselytisation and transactional coexistence.

What the arrests change, and what they do not

The most optimistic reading is that neutralising senior Ansaru leaders will slow operational planning, complicate cross-border procurement of arms, and deter terrorist groups from entering into further tactical pacts. In the near term, that could translate into fewer complex ambushes, fewer kidnappings with political messaging, and a reduction in the movement of specialist bombmakers or media operatives between northwest Nigeria and Sahelian fronts.

If the digital evidence that Ribadu referenced is robust and rapidly exploited, the state could also roll up facilitators in markets, transport unions, and phone shops that act as the quiet arteries of clandestine groups. 

A more cautious reading is grounded in Ansaru’s history and the adaptive ecology of violence in the North West. The group is small, but it has repeatedly used alliances to magnify its reach. If surviving mid-level cadres can maintain relationships with bandit-terror leaders who control forest sanctuaries and rural taxation points, Ansaru can regenerate a functional structure even without marquee names at the top. 

In some cases, the brand itself is a currency: men can claim to be acting on behalf of Ansaru to secure access, while the real command node sits far away and communicates sparingly. Detentions alone do not break that reputational economy.

There is also the question of displacement. Pressure in one theatre can push cadres into neighbouring spaces. As long as Sahelian conflict systems continue to produce itinerant trainers and brokers with AQIM or JNIM pedigrees, there will be a supply to meet Nigeria’s demand for clandestine services. Here, the government’s signalling about cross-border links is more than public relations. It points toward the necessity of intelligence sharing with Niger, and, depending on the political climate, with authorities in Mali and Burkina Faso, where applicable. Securing those partnerships in an era of coups and shifting alliances is not a technical task. It is political.

What would “success” look like six months from now?

A realistic definition of success is not zero attacks, but measurable attrition in Ansaru’s facilitation capacity and a visible shrinking of its rural social space. There are indicators Nigerians can watch for:

• Fewer kidnap incidents with clear ideological framing in Kaduna’s rural west and adjacent corridors, and more arrests of kidnap coordinators with al-Qaida ties.
• Disruption of preacher networks that have been used to socialise communities into Ansaru’s worldview, ideally with community-led alternatives filling the vacuum.
• Intelligence-led seizures on trunk and feeder roads that connect markets in Kaduna and Niger States to forest hideouts, particularly around Birnin Gwari, Kuyello, and Damari.
• Public defections of mid-level facilitators following a perception that the brand can no longer protect them from arrest or rival bandits.

If kidnappings bridge into the harvest season with familiar signatures, or if new names suddenly surface to replace those detained, then the state will need to ask whether it has struck the right balance between kinetic pressure and political management of the rural economy of violence.

The bottom line

Ribadu’s announcement is welcome news in a war that has lacked good headlines. For a government facing simultaneous pressure in the North East and the North West, removing Ansaru leaders offers a chance to disrupt one of the more insidious cross-border pipelines feeding violence in Nigeria’s heartland. 

The history, though, counsels humility. Ansaru has absorbed leadership losses before, gone quiet, and then reconstituted itself where the state was weakest. What comes next will depend less on what was said at a podium than on what happens on back roads and in forest clearings, at checkpoints and market stalls, and in the daily bargains between frightened communities and the armed men who claim to protect or prey on them.

If the new arrests are leveraged to dismantle facilitation networks, to keep pressure on safe havens, and to fill the governance gap that Ansaru has so skillfully exploited, then Nigeria could indeed be at a turning point. If not, the country risks watching this chapter follow the pattern of 2012 and 2016, when a decapitated network lay low and then returned in a new guise. 

The choice now is whether to treat this as a headline or as the start of a sustained campaign that finally closes Ansaru’s page in Nigeria’s long insurgent story. 

It’s 1:00 p.m., and the sun in Maiduguri, North East Nigeria, scorches without mercy – too hot to stand still and too bright to keep eyes open. Under the blistering heat, however, children clutch their bowls tightly, roaming the streets for food.

When it rains, they shiver violently, teeth clattering loud enough to be heard from several feet away, their stomachs rumbling, their eyes scanning for anything edible. With bleeding heels and limps from split soles, their skin looks cracked during the harmattan. They often wander around, drifting through dumpsites with empty bowls or plastic bags clutched to their sides.

At fast food joints, they watch others eat, swatting flies from their eyes and the corners of their mouths, waiting for crumbs or spilt leftovers. By nightfall, they curl under bridges or behind kiosks, sleeping beneath shop awnings, or wherever a patch of shadow might pass for shelter. 

They survive on dumpsites and gutters, scavenging for scraps, stretching out their palms to uninterested pedestrians, and knocking on car windows with quiet pleas. Some chant, some mumble, and some say nothing at all. It rarely makes a difference; most of the time, no one listens. 

HumAngle has spoken to scores of children uprooted and shaped by the Boko Haram insurgency in the northeastern region. Broken and disadvantaged, many of these children say they resort to scavenging at dumpsites to survive, searching through refuse to feed themselves and support their families.

Twelve-year-old Ibrahim Ali, one of the scavenging boys HumAngle interviewed, returns with some metal scraps from a day-long exploration. “I always look for metal scraps that I can sell to support my family,” Ibrahim said. “On a good day, I find three to four kilos of metal that I sell for ₦300 per kilo. But on normal days, I get less than that. Sometimes I may end up without getting any scraps worth selling.”

The Boko Haram conflict unravelled the social safety net entirely. It swelled the ranks of the homeless, turned children into scavengers, and broke the links between family, education, and protection. When two cases of child abuse surfaced recently in the media, the public had a rare glimpse into the routine violence many children silently endure. The first involved a schoolgirl caught plucking mangoes, who was beaten with fists and kicks by the tree’s owner. The second was a video that emerged from a Tsangaya school: a boy stripped shirtless, doused with water, sand poured over him, and lashed mercilessly by his teacher.

The backlash was swift. The teacher was arrested. The state awarded the boy a scholarship. There was outrage. There were hashtags. However, the troubles facing children caught up in war zones are far more disturbing; the future of many of them is held to ransom by terrorists, ruining lives and properties in the suburbs of Borno state.

Bama, for instance, was once a bustling commercial hub, a critical trade link for merchants from Cameroon and neighbouring Nigerian states. But in 2014, it became the first major town to fall to Boko Haram. What followed was the collapse of life as it had once been. When the military reclaimed the town, a deepening humanitarian crisis emerged. Today in Bama, children roam the streets. Many have no idea where their parents are or what it means to be cared for.

These gaps in protection are realities carved into the lives of children like Adamu and Bala, who are forced to navigate survival without the support of family.

Adamu is just 10 years old, yet he carries himself with the hollowed, guarded manner of someone much older. He lives alone in a displacement camp in Bama, a place originally meant to provide safety, but where no one takes responsibility for him. “I don’t know who my parents are,” he said quietly, avoiding eye contact. “I just sleep anywhere in the camp. Sometimes near the fence, or by the market sheds.”

At sunrise, he sets out for Bama town, wandering in search of food. “In the morning, I go to town to beg. That’s how I survive,” he said. 

In Konduga, 12-year-old Bala lives a different but equally difficult life. He shares a shelter in the IDP camp with his mother and two younger brothers, but the conditions are dire. “We don’t have food,” he said. “I beg on the streets to eat.” His father disappeared years ago, and Bala doesn’t know whether he’s alive or dead. Now, as the oldest child, he bears a responsibility far beyond his age, providing for his family.

Both boys are among the estimated 2.6 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Borno, more than half of whom are children. Despite the scale of the need, investment in education remains limited. Between 2020 and 2023, the Education Cannot Wait (ECW) initiative allocated US$20.1 million to support nearly 2.9 million children across Borno, Adamawa, and Yobe. In 2024, it pledged another US$15 million to reach over 130,000 more. 

“We cannot talk about algebra when they haven’t eaten,” said Mohammad Bunu, an educationist working with displaced and vulnerable children in northeastern Nigeria. The real crisis isn’t infrastructure; it’s the disconnect between formal education models and the survival realities of children in camps and communities, he said.

Bunu calls for a shift toward community-based education that combines basic literacy with vocational training, such as carpentry, tailoring, agriculture, and technology. “They need a path beyond begging or just attending school. Reintegration isn’t only for ex-combatants. We must invest in skills that restore dignity.

Longkat Enock, a clinical psychologist, adds that education must have structured emotional support. “You can’t heal a broken society if you ignore its broken children,” he warned. “They’ve seen killings, starvation and abandonment, yet no one asks how they feel.”

Longkat advocates for trained counsellors, safe spaces, and mentorship. “If we keep acting like food and books alone are enough, we’ll be here again in ten years, facing even more shattered futures.”

“We’re not just talking about children missing school, we’re talking about children missing entire stages of development,” said Bunu. “In many of these camps, there’s no structure, no routine, no trained teachers. It’s impossible to talk about rebuilding a society without rebuilding its education system first.”

The coordinators of a makeshift displacement camp at the Government Day Science Secondary School (GDSSS) in Bama say they host over 109,000 people, including more than 64,000 children.

When HumAngle visited the GDSSS school within the camp, the classrooms were empty, and only five teachers were present. “We don’t have more than 50 pupils attending class regularly,” one teacher said.

“When these boys grow up without any care, what will they turn into?” asked Bulama Abdu, a community elder in Bama. “We suffered from one generation of angry boys with guns. Are we raising another?”

“Conflict doesn’t end by hosting displaced people at camps or even back to their communities. If children are left without education, stability, or guidance, the trauma festers. They become vulnerable to criminality, violence, even new forms of extremism,” Enock added.

This concern is similar in post-conflict zones. In South Sudan, neglected war-affected youth became prime targets for militia recruitment. In post-war Liberia, years of childhood abandonment fed into cycles of urban violence. The Nigerian government has refused to articulate a long-term reintegration and education policy specifically targeting children displaced or affected by the Boko Haram conflict. 

Reintegration efforts in the northeastern region largely prioritise ex-combatants, neglecting civilian victims and displaced children. Education-in-emergencies programs, such as learning centres for orphans, remain donor-dependent and limited in scale. Just 27 per cent of school-aged children in humanitarian response plans have received adequate education support, leaving the vast majority without access.

Health educators note that many Nigerians resist birth control on religious grounds. One family-planning counsellor explained that when the term for “family planning” (literally “limiting birth”) was introduced in Hausa (“Kaiyadde Iyali”), people instantly objected, asking, “Who are you to limit birth?”.  They cite Qur’anic teaching that “Allah will provide for all children.” Many of them see large families as divinely ordained and avoid family planning on faith-based grounds.

Traditional socioeconomics also favour big families.  In rural northern society, women live mostly at home and rely on children for chores and farm work.  Children thus serve as household labour and social security.  Having many sons or daughters brings status and assistance.

When HumAngle randomly spoke to some young persons in Maiduguri, the sentiment was nearly unanimous: family planning is perceived as a Western concept, alien to their values. Most respondents said they desired at least eight children, with several aiming for ten or more. “It is God who takes care of children,” said one of the young men. “Every child comes with their destiny. If he makes it, he will make it. If not, nothing the parents do will change that.”

For 27-year-old Adamu Ali, fathering ten children is part of his plan. “At least five of them will grow up to look after me when I’m old,” he said with conviction. His rationale is not uncommon in most northern communities where the collapse of formal social safety nets has reinforced the reliance on children as a form of long-term security.

UNICEF reports that Borno has one of Nigeria’s highest out-of-school rates, as roughly 1.8 million children lack access to schooling. A study found that conflict-affected women showed increased preference for larger families, viewing “more children as a coping strategy amid insecurity, seeking enhanced social and economic security, or replacing lost members during the conflict”. 

In other words, families often cling to the belief that God will provide for any children they have, even when resources vanish.  Humanitarian workers and relatives thus become the de facto caregivers for these unplanned generations, as villagers insist on growing their families in the hope of divine provision.

The ongoing boko haram conflict has shattered traditional support systems. Where once extended families or religious communities would help raise children, displacement and poverty have made that impossible.

“We don’t plan children,” said Hajja Fatima, a 45-year-old widow in Maiduguri raising six children alone. “That is God’s work. If he gives, you take.”

Boko Haram launched a four-hour assault on Kirawa, a border community in Gwoza Local Government Area of Borno State, northeastern Nigeria, on Saturday night, Aug. 7, displacing hundreds and leaving a trail of destruction.

Buba Aji, a schoolteacher at Kirawa Central Primary School, had just settled in for a quiet evening with his family. After dinner, they all retired to bed. The beginning of the night was marked by the usual rainy-season chorus of croaking frogs and deep silence. But at about 9 p.m., Buba began to hear distant gunfire. Thirty minutes later, the sounds grew louder and closer.

“Before we knew it, the entire town was filled with the sounds of heavy blasts and gunfire. We could clearly distinguish the exchange of shots between Boko Haram and the soldiers at the barracks. That’s when we knew it was an attack,” he recalled.

Like many residents, Buba fled with his family toward the border between Kirawa and Kerawa in Cameroon, joining hundreds of others fleeing their homes. “It was chaotic, we could see Cameroonian soldiers and members of the Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF) driving in to take positions,” Buba told HumAngle. 

While some families crossed into Cameroon, others remained at the border gate, seeking safety alongside some of the military personnel. Locals who spoke to HumAngle said that the Boko Haram fighters set fire to the house of the community head, looted properties, and burned civilian trucks and homes during the raid. At the MNJTF post, where the fierce battle took place, some military facilities and vehicles were set ablaze or damaged.

Amid the chaos, they abducted a teenage girl, Aisha Mohammed Aja. She recently completed her Junior Secondary School examinations and was awaiting her results. 

Local sources reported that four soldiers were killed in the attack and that no residents died, but HumAngle has been unable to verify this with local authorities. 

Kirawa has endured repeated Boko Haram attacks since it was first overrun in August 2014, forcing residents to flee to Cameroon and other parts of Borno. After residents were repatriated in 2022, the community has suffered multiple attacks this year alone, including deadly raids in February and July. Each attack follows a similar pattern, targeting both military and civilians.

Last year, HumAngle reported extensively on the unsettling realities facing displaced families resettled in Kirawa, who, even a year after their return, continue to face insecurity, poverty, government neglect, and continued displacement. 

The ring light in Amina Yusuf’s* room stood near an old white wardrobe. For months, it remained unused, except during the occasional recordings where she mimed along to Hausa love songs, glancing between her phone screen and the mirror at the other side of the room. These moments were fleeting, unsure steps in her experiment with social media, particularly TikTok.

But when the news came that Facebook had rolled out monetisation features for content creators in Nigeria, something stirred. Opportunity, like the sudden spark of light, loomed and offered a new possibility. Not fame, no – at least not yet – but fortune, or its illusion.

“As soon as I heard about it,” she said, fiddling with the edge of her veil, “I knew this was a way to earn from what I was already doing.”

She speaks with the assurance of someone who has discovered a private economy within a public world. Amina converted her dormant Facebook profile, once used to scroll aimlessly through posts and video reels, into a professional page. She followed every breadcrumb Facebook’s interface dropped: optimize your bio, post consistently, engage followers, and cross-promote from Instagram. Soon enough, the app crowned her eligible for monetisation.

And that’s when her trouble began.

In this algorithmic marketplace, virality is currency. With 190 thousand followers on Facebook, her reach was growing – thousands of views, shares, and comments flooding her posts. Amina’s strategy was simple: find trending TikTok videos and repost them. It didn’t matter whether the videos were true or false, informative or inflammatory.

“My job is just to share,” she said. “It’s the viewer’s responsibility to figure out if it’s true or not.”

“Sometimes I earn between 10 to 15 dollars a day,” she said, not with pride, but a sense of surprise. “That’s a lot of money for someone like me. I even paid my school fees with it.”

As a university student in Northern Nigeria, where classrooms are overcrowded, lectures often suspended, and lecturers underpaid, she says her digital hustle has made her richer than her lecturers.

“I earn more than them,” she said plainly. “Imagine that.” She referenced how recently a university professor revealed the dire professional conditions they find themselves in.

To digital rights activists and fact-checkers, Amina is not just a clever student seizing a modern opportunity. She is part of a growing ecosystem that profits from confusion. What she calls content, they call misinformation. Monetised misinformation.

Facebook’s monetisation in Africa, especially in Nigeria and particularly in the northern part of the country, has become a double-edged sword. On one hand, it democratizes income in a region that ranks high in poverty rate. On the other hand, it rewards spectacle, sometimes at the expense of truth. Sensational headlines, recycled conspiracy theories, emotional hoaxes: these are the new exports of a digital continent eager to be seen, eager to be paid.

Amina does not deny this. But she also does not apologise.

“I don’t make the videos,” she said. “I just share what people have already posted. If it makes people comment and watch, that’s all I need.”

Her profile on Facebook is a mixture of different videos – politics, religion, celebrity gossip, football, and everything that may generate engagements. Among this, is the amplification of information disorder originally shared by the creators of the videos. 

For example, in a Facebook post that garnered over 60 shares, she amplified a false claim that Osun State Governor Adeleke had announced Babagana Zulum would spearhead the defection of five Northern governors to the new coalition of ADC. Despite the claim being publicly debunked, the post is still on her profile.

An algorithm designed for outrage

By design, Facebook’s algorithm privileges intensity over integrity. According to the platform’s own documentation, content that provokes strong emotional reactions – anger, fear, shock– is more likely to spread. For many users in Northern Nigeria, where Facebook doubles as both a social space and a news source, this has created a chaotic digital environment where engagement is currency and accuracy is often overlooked.

“Facebook isn’t just a platform here,” said Bashir Sharfadi, a journalist based in Kano. “It’s the main source of news for millions. So when influencers post fake news, the impact is immediate and vast.”

A 2020 report by the Centre for Democracy and Development (CDD) West Africa, revealed that most of the viral posts flagged by Nigerian fact-checkers in the previous year originated from influencers who directly benefited from Facebook’s financial incentives. The rewards are tangible and tempting.

One such influencer, who regularly posts unverified videos to nearly a million followers, put it plainly: “It’s about engagement, not content.” He explained how influencers operate in coordinated communities, often through WhatsApp groups, sharing what trends, what triggers reaction. “The only reason we avoid some kinds of content, like nudity, is religious. But many others still post that too.”

The more scandalous the claim, the greater the traffic. And with traffic comes income.

But Sharfadi warns that the crisis goes beyond the individual pursuit of profit. It has become institutional: a digital ecosystem where misinformation is normalised, defended, and scaled.

“Our biggest challenge isn’t detecting lies,” he said. “It’s competing with the incentives that come with spreading them.” 

But Sharfadi has more concerns. People believe misinformation and they don’t care even after it is fact-checked.

In one recent case, a TikTok video targeting an activist named Dan Bello was re-edited and republished across Facebook and WhatsApp. Dan Bello is a popular Hausa vlogger with millions of followers on Facebook, TikTok, and X, posting mainly on accountability in governance.

The manipulated clip, falsely portrayed Dan Bello as ‘an enemy of Islam’ supporting an attack on Muslim clerics by showing him raising thumbs up on an audio attached to the video. It gained massive traction. The result: a popular cleric condemned Dan Bello publicly, sparking backlash that lingered even after the video was proven to be doctored.

“Even when the cleric apologised, people still believed he had been threatened into doing so,” said Sharfadi. “The damage had already been done.”

Another case involved one Sultan, a TikTok influencer known for posting commentary on current events. During the recent Israeli-Iran conflict, he claimed that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu was hiding in a bunker, near death. The clip was later manipulated to feature an image of Nigeria’s President Tinubu and circulated widely.

Sultan is now in jail.

“He was arrested in Kano for something he never did,” posted his lawyer on Facebook. “There was no investigation. No effort to verify. Just a swift response to digital noise.”

The story of Sultan is a portrait of a system where the line between user-generated content and criminal liability is dangerously blurred.

Who bears the burden?

In response to the growing crisis, Meta—Facebook’s parent company—has recently taken down and demonetised dozens of accounts for violating its content policies. But enforcement remains scattershot.

One influencer interviewed for this report admitted to receiving multiple warnings. Yet his account remains active and profitable.

About what caused a restriction on his account, he admitted, “I know it’s wrong, but if I stop, someone else will do it. So what’s the point?”

Critics argue that Facebook’s moderation policies are inconsistent and reactive. Content flagged in English may be removed, while misinformation in Hausa, spoken by tens of millions, is often overlooked.

“What we see is a system where the platform benefits, the influencers benefit, and the public suffers,” Sharfadi said. “It’s not just about demonetization. It’s about influence. These pages, with their massive followings, can be rented. You pay, they publish whatever narrative you want.”

The commodification of disinformation has taken root. Several influencers are now operating as pay-for-post vendors, spreading political propaganda and conspiracy theories on demand.

Fact-checkers like Muhammad Dahiru believe that Facebook must go beyond machine learning and invest in people—moderators fluent in local languages and cultures, equipped to flag false content in real time.

“We need language-specific moderation, especially in Hausa, which is the lingua franca in Northern Nigeria,” Muhammad said. “Otherwise, misinformation will remain the most profitable game in town.”

He added, “There must be accountability. Either platforms police themselves, or governments will do it for them. And when governments control speech, history reminds us what follows.” Muhammad believes the work against misinformation is shared responsibility  “between the government, Facebook, and civil society organisations.” 

For now, Northern Nigeria’s digital public is left to sort through a feed where facts and falsehoods blend seamlessly, where a student like Amina can pay tuition with profits from misinformation, and an activist like Dan Bello can be condemned for something that never happened.

The asterisked name is a pseudonym we have used at the source’s request to protect her against backlash.

In the early hours of Sunday, July 27, as most of Yola South slept, a violent flood tore through the communities of Sabon Pegi, Yolde Pate, and Shagari, submerging homes and shaking lives in the darkness. Panic spread as terrified families scrambled to higher ground with parents clutching their children and whatever belongings they could salvage. While some residents found safety in the highlands, others were trapped in their homes because the water levels were too high. 

One of the trapped residents was Hope Bitrus. 

Hope, a resident of Sabon Pegi in Yola South, Adamawa State, northeastern Nigeria, said, like everyone in the community, the flood took her family by surprise, as it came while they were asleep around 3 a.m.  

“We heard someone knocking on the door. It was our neighbour who came to inform us that the whole street was getting flooded,” she told HumAngle.

Just then, her whole verandah became flooded, and the water level rose so high that it poured into their rooms through the open window. 

“And at that point, we knew the best thing to do was to get out. My husband and I were able to get our smaller children out of the house, but their eldest sister, who was in the other room, was trapped,” she said.

Hope and her husband struggled with the door, but it didn’t open.

“There was no way we could leave without our daughter, so we screamed from outside the door and told her to climb through the window, but then, the water was pouring inside her room through the window.” 

The girl started to panic, crying, and her parents got even more confused.

“We added more pressure on the door and managed to open it, and then she was able to get out,”  she recalled.

By the time the girl got out, the water level had gone higher. All three of them had to climb the wall for support and then get to the roof for safety. 

“I watched my items flooding away. I think the things that didn’t move were the couch and other heavy items, but clothes, utensils, food items, and other things were washed away before our eyes,” Hope said. 

No place like home 

Like Hope Bitrus, many residents of the affected communities lost their properties and valuables in the flood. When HumAngle spoke to some of them on the day of the incident, their basic concern was food and shelter.

To address these immediate concerns, the Adamawa State government turned a public secondary school in Yola South into a temporary displacement camp. Security forces were deployed to guard the area and regulate movement among the displaced. 

HumAngle learned that a public announcement was made, urging all those affected by the flood to come to the school for formal registration.

According to the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA), a total of 5560 persons were displaced; about 927 households were affected, with 524 households displaced, and 25 people dead. At least 11 people are still missing. 

“When the announcement was made, even those who were not affected by the flooding trooped into the school to obtain meal tickets and registration cards, so by the time most of us who were affected got there, basic relief items had finished,” Rukaiyah Hamid Jalo, one of the affected residents from Yola Bypass, told HumAngle. 

Hope explained that during the three days they spent in the makeshift camp, she and her family had to spread a wrapper on the bare floor for the children to sleep because the camp had insufficient supplies like mats and blankets. 

“Before we got the news that the camp was opened and that people were asked to come and register, it was already Monday, so by the time we reached, relief materials like mats, buckets, and soaps were already shared by the Red Cross, so we didn’t get any,” she said. 

Like many others, Chafari Wisdom, another affected resident, told HumAngle that her family couldn’t access basic supplies in the camp due to severe shortages. She added that the classrooms were overcrowded and lacked mats to lie on, leaving her desperate to return home, even though her home was ruined. 

“One morning, my sister and I left the camp to go and check our home because we wanted to leave there as soon as possible but when we got home, we noticed that even though the water level had gone down, the place was yet to dry up so we had no choice but to go back to the camp because there was no place we can stay,” Chafari said. 

When HumAngle visited the temporary camp, the crowd was largely made up of women sitting in groups. Some of them explained that their husbands had stayed behind to guard what was left of their destroyed homes to prevent vandalism and theft. 

Healthcare workers from the primary healthcare centres in Yola South, the International Community of the Red Cross (ICRC), Nigerian Air Force emergency clinic, and others were deployed to provide medical assistance to the people. Complicated cases were said to be referred to the State Specialist Hospital. 

In the school kitchen, members of the ICRC had taken over to cook meals for the displaced. 

Despite getting a roof over their heads, Hope said there was nowhere she wanted to be other than home because life in the camp was difficult. 

HumAngle gathered that the displaced people receive two meals a day provided by the ICRC. Civil society organisations and some individuals have also visited the camp to distribute cooked meals and snacks. However, some of the displaced people said the crowd was so much that the food hardly went round. 

Chafari mentioned that she had to leave the camp one time and head back to her house to see if she could get something for her children when the food rations didn’t reach them. 

“I couldn’t get anything. The entire storeroom was flooded,” she said. 

A woman who pleaded anonymity told HumAngle that she felt abandoned by the government because most of the healthcare and feeding support they received in the camp was from non-profit organisations, particularly the Red Cross. 

“We were overcrowded. We barely had any food. At one point, we just wanted to go back home even though it was yet to dry up,” she said. 

HumAngle tried to reach the Adamawa State Emergency Management Agency (ADSEMA) for a comment on matters like the shortage of food and basic supplies, but all efforts proved abortive.

On July 30th, the Agency’s executive secretary, Celine Laori, disclosed during a gathering where HumAngle was present that the camp was officially closing based on directives from the Adamawa State Governor. Displaced persons received cash tokens, relief materials like blankets, mats, rice, and noodles. 

Even though residents like Hope and Chafari wanted to get back home due to a lack of access to food and relief materials, others were not ready. HumAngle observed that some houses, particularly at the end of Shagari Phase 2, were yet to dry up, but since the camp has been closed barely 3 days into operation, residents were left with no choice 

Back to the ruins

On the streets of Yola By-pass and Sabon Pegi, drenched carpets, mattresses, and furniture were littered across the streets to dry. Collapsed fences and broken walls showed dismantled roofs and ruined homes. Women and children swept and mopped while some men collected blocks and zincs. 

Chafari’s entire furniture is covered in mud, with many items gone. She noted that apart from the financial cost of the incident, she is also grappling with the mental toll. 

“Among the dead bodies recovered from the flood were my neighbour’s children. Two of them were washed away, and right now, their father is yet to be found. We don’t know whether he’s dead or alive,” she said. 

Rukaiyah is back home with her children, but she says she doesn’t know where to begin. Even though the token she received at the camp doesn’t make up a fraction of what she had lost, she expressed gratitude for it. 

Enoch Jared, a resident of Sabon Pegi, said he didn’t go to the camp because his family had already managed to wash one of the rooms after the floods and so they stayed there instead. He also needed to be at home to watch over what was left of his house since the floods destroyed the fence. 

“It’s been days since the incident occurred, and no one from the government has come down to even greet or check up on us in our community. Only those who made it to the camp got aid,” he said. 

After losing his animals, properties,  and a portion of his home, Enoch said right now, he’s focused on fixing his fence and ensuring his family members get food on their table. 

The cause

Since the flooding occurred, there has been intense debate among locals and on social media about its cause. Some alleged that a Chinese mining company operating in Bole, a community in Yola South, blocked a natural water channel due to its mining activities. As a result, when heavy rainfall occurred, the water had no passage and was forced to flow back into residential areas. Others claimed that a dam in the Bole area had broken, thus triggering the flood. 

HumAngle visited the Bole community and the mining site, which is used for extracting fluoride. While the dam itself remains intact, HumAngle observed that a waterway was constructed by the mining company to reduce excess water from the dam when it reaches high levels. The diverted water from the dam flows through the company’s man-made water channel and then empties itself into the Yola River. 

A stakeholder in the Bole community and also a staff member of the Mining Company, Aliyu Umaru, said allegations that the mining activities blocked a water channel or that a dam broke are untrue. 

According to him, the company constructed the dam to serve as a water source for washing extracted materials during the mining exercise.

“We have a license here, and the government is aware, so it is our responsibility to protect the community and not do anything to harm it,” Aliyu said.

The Governor of Adamawa State, Ahmadu Umaru Fintiri, and his team visited the mining site in Bole on July 30th for an assessment. The visit was said to be prompted by concerns raised by locals who attribute the flooding to the mining incidents. After conducting the assessment, the Governor clarified that neither the dam nor the mining activities were responsible for the flood. He stated that the unauthorised construction of buildings on waterways and drainage channels impeded the natural flow of water, thus resulting in the flood.

Felix Yupenda depends entirely on his harvests to sustain his family. He is a local farmer in Wukari, Taraba State, North East Nigeria, who grew up on the farm and has worked there for over 30 years.

“I learnt how to cultivate yam and cassava from my father, but I also supplement it with other crops like rice, beans, and Guinea corn,” he told HumAngle.

He had planted yam seedlings weeks ago, taking advantage of the moist soil left behind by an early rainfall. But since then, the rains have ceased, and he is worried that his seedlings might rot in the hardened earth. He is also concerned about the other supplementary crops like maize and beans, which are beginning to dry up. 

“Scientists say we won’t have rain in the coming days, and we are currently seeing the signs, but everything is in God’s hands. We are still praying,” Felix moped. 

He noted that in situations like this, farmers only hope and pray for divine intervention, as rainfall is a natural phenomenon beyond their control. But he is anxious. 

“If the rain doesn’t come, then I’m finished, I don’t have any other job that will sustain my wife and kids aside from farming.” 

Dry skies 

Taraba is undergoing a flash drought, as the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) predicts a cessation of rainfall lasting more than 21 days from mid-July. Catastrophic rainfall is anticipated by the end of August. The state is experiencing erratic rainfall, with dry spells of up to five days after each rain episode in Jalingo, the state capital, and surrounding areas.

Fidelis Nashuka, the Director of Planning, Research, and Statistics at the Taraba State Ministry of Environment and Climate Change, told HumAngle that drought is becoming a recurring issue. He noted that Taraba experienced a severe episode last year despite not being traditionally classified as drought-prone.

“Last year’s drought affected crop production, and many farmers lost their crops to it,” he said. 

While the state is experiencing signs like erratic rainfall, Fidelis hopes the aftermath will not be as severe as last year. He said the signal, though devastating, might be a good sign for residents, especially farmers, to start working towards mitigating the drought. 

“This is July. We are expected to have full rainfall at its peak across all the states, but we are experiencing variations in different areas, which is a matter of concern, and if care is not taken, the rains may cease while our crops are yet to mature,” he added. 

He stated that the most at-risk communities are in northern Taraba, especially those bordering Adamawa and Gombe states. He explained that these areas are facing a significant reduction in rainfall compared to Taraba’s southern and central areas. The affected areas include Zing, Yorro, Lau, Karim Lamido, and others. 

HumAngle interviewed Ephraim Tor, a farmer from the Bali Local Government Area. He expressed concern that his community is currently facing drought and, like many other farmers, is anxious about the future. “Last year, my maize dried up, and I got almost nothing,” he said.

Ephraim added that rice farmers in Bali were struck the hardest, and while the skies remain dry, many are growing anxious. “We are just waiting for God to give us rain because there is nothing we can do,” the local farmer complained. 

Fidelis noted that areas previously receiving consistent rainfall for five to six months each year have recently experienced a decline. This reduction now affects the southern parts of Taraba and the central area, where noticeable changes in rainfall patterns are observed. The environmental researcher explained that the drought is beginning to impact food production and trade, as buyers from neighbouring states may stop coming due to decreasing harvests.

On the edge

Abdullahi Sanda, a large-scale commercial farmer from the Lau LGA, seemed anxious while speaking to HumAngle. The cessation of rainfall had caused him many sleepless nights due to the distressing experiences he faced last year. 

He cultivates maize and rice but primarily focuses on large-scale rice farming. He stores the harvested rice and sells it to traders and businesspeople from Kano and other states. With his extensive land, Abdullahi typically harvests over 200 bags of rice at the end of each farming season, but last year was quite different.

“Since my years of farming in this region, I’ve never experienced drought until last year. They said it is climate change,” Abdullahi said. 

In 2024, it was reported that farmers across several LGAs in Taraba lost crops worth millions after rainfall ceased for weeks. 

“Last year, after planting, we sprayed pesticides, which we normally do as a form of weeding in July. This pesticide requires moisture to take effect, but then, the weeds didn’t die because there was no rain,” he recounted. “The rice farm dried up to the extent that one matchstick, if lit up, can set it ablaze. After spending a lot of money on the pesticides, we realised that even if we buy another one, it won’t work because there was no moisture, so we hired people to weed it manually.”

Manual weeding cost Abdullahi over ₦500,000 due to his farm size.

“We didn’t budget for that expense, but sometimes you must take risks. The manual weeding was beneficial, but the rains returned late,” he sighed. He explained that when a bag of rice is planted, it should yield at least 30 to 35 bags. Despite planting around 10 bags last year, which was expected to produce about 300 bags, he ultimately harvested only 194 bags. “It was a massive loss. I have another small farm, and I planted rice there, but the rice didn’t even germinate.”

Despite recording a low harvest, Abdullahi was lucky. Many rice farmers cleared their farms, planted rice, and waited for it to germinate, but due to a lack of rainfall, it didn’t germinate, he said, expressing fear over signs of drought in his region because of the short and irregular rainfall.

“This year, I bought about ₦183 000 worth of weed pesticides sprayed across the rice farm, but there was no rain. So yesterday, I bought another batch worth ₦65,000 and I’m waiting for the rain to come before I spray it because the pesticide requires moisture and I can’t afford to make another loss.”

If another drought hits this year, the farmer said he would be forced into debt like other farmers in Wukari. They had planted yams, groundnut, and rice, but didn’t reap anything when the rain ceased last year. Everything came to a standstill. The groundnuts dried up, and the yam seedlings withered.

To recover from the loss, farmers in his area had to sell the little crops they harvested at a cheaper rate because they were in dire need of money to clear debts and make ends meet. The crash in the prices of farm produce was a huge loss to farmers. For instance, a measure of maize usually sold for ₦700 was now sold for ₦400 because the farmers needed the cash.

Something similar might happen this year, Fidelis warned.

Not a drought-prone state

The drought situation in Taraba is attributed to climate change and human factors like deforestation. From 2018 to 2023, massive deforestation occurred in Taraba, which is now affecting the state’s climatic conditions. Gembu, a town known as one of the coldest places in Nigeria, is experiencing a sharp temperature increase.

“Till today, we are experiencing an increase in deforestation, even though the government is trying its best. We see people from outside Taraba coming into the state to cut down trees and produce charcoal,” Fidelis stated, adding that the state has a law prohibiting the felling of trees under 15 years old. “They cut down trees below 10 years and economic trees, and now, we are seeing the effects.”

Ephraim pleads with the government to provide farmers with subsidised fertilisers to help cushion the adversity. However, Fidelis observed that the government is doing its best to create awareness of building community resilience and mitigation strategies for adapting to changes in weather conditions. He urged local communities to grasp the effects of climate change on agricultural areas and how they can contribute to mitigating its impact.

“The gap is that more trees are being felled and planting is not in the same ratio with the rate of cutting, so if this kind of scenario continues, our weather will keep changing,” Fidelis stressed. 

To withstand the looming drought, he called on farmers nationwide to opt for seedlings that can mature quickly if planted. He said those who grow crops that require a longer time to mature are at a disadvantage. For those into rice farming, which requires adequate rainfall, Fidelis advised that they opt for specific seedlings that don’t need much water. He charged the media and civil society organisations to do more to create awareness of climate change and the relevance of tree planting.

While hoping the drought forecast doesn’t materialise despite its signs, Felix is looking forward to making something out of his yam farm for consumption, if not for commercial purposes. 

“Right now, my main concern is what my family will eat because education and clothing have become a luxury,” he said. 

Abdullahi said he has no choice but to invest in strategies to withstand the drought since it is gradually forming a pattern. Some methods involve digging boreholes around the farm and using solar panels to power water machines to supply the farm with water. Abdullahi is willing to adapt this technique, even though it is expensive. 

 “I just pray we don’t experience much loss this year,” he said. 

On The Crisis Room, we’re following insecurity trends across Nigeria.

Nigeria’s security landscape is a complex and multifaceted one. The dynamics differ according to each region. In Borno State, there is the Boko Haram and ISWAP insurgency, and complications resulting from the government’s resettlement efforts.

In this episode, we will be hearing the voices of some HumAngle reporters as they offer insight from their respective regions of coverage.

Hosts: Salma and Salim

Guests: Usman Abba Zanna, Saduwo Banyawa, Labbo Abdullahi, Damilola Ayeni

Audio producer: Anthony Asemota

Executive producer: Ahmad Salkida

At the Muna Kumburi camp along Dikwa Road in Maiduguri, northeastern Nigeria, displaced families are taking desperate steps to survive. 

With the provision of humanitarian aid having been ceased for over three years and growing insecurity keeping them from farming freely, dozens of internally displaced people (IDPs) have begun dismantling and selling the very shelters meant to keep them safe.

“We have no choice,” Malum Aisami, the camp chairperson, told HumAngle. “People are in such a desperate situation that they sell their shelter and travel using the money.”

The makeshift tents, constructed from wood, tarpaulin, and zinc sheets, are sold for ₦40,000 to ₦50,000. They use the money to feed their families, buy seeds, cultivate lands in remote areas, or attempt to resettle in safer areas.

When HumAngle visited the camp on July 24, many spaces where shelters once stood now lay bare, marked by upturned soil and abandoned frames. 

While some moved into nearby host communities after selling their shelter, other families squeezed into overcrowded shelters with relatives in the camp. Many travelled to remote bush areas to work on farmlands, and some relocated entirely to farming settlements for the duration of the rainy season–a common practice among families in the region seeking seasonal agricultural income.

“I sold it so that I can use the money to go and buy seeds and feed myself on the farm,” Baisa Modu said, pointing to the plot where his shelter used to be.

Camp residents say the situation worsened when the state government began constructing buildings in parts of the camp, displacing even more families within an already overcrowded space. Some residents relocated to nearby host communities, but many remain in desperation for a good life.

“So far, we’ve recorded over 50 households who dismantled and sold their shelters and moved on. Even me, I sold one of mine. There is hunger, and we cannot go to a farm in peace. There is insecurity and abduction on a daily basis,” Aisami said. 

In February this year, several residents of the same camp were abducted while fetching firewood in the bush. Their families were forced to launch crowdfunding efforts, scraping together ₦300,000 in a desperate attempt to pay the ransom demanded.

Now, as hunger worsens and with risks rising, selling shelters has become a survival strategy, even if it means sleeping in the open or starting over in a new place.

Despite their depressing conditions, over 200 households were also forced to vacate parts of the Muna Kumburi camp last month to make way for a government construction project. The development, which affected nearly half of the camp’s area, rendered many families homeless, pushing them to seek refuge in surrounding host communities.

The camp, which accommodates over 3,000 individuals across more than 600 households, is now experiencing one of its most severe humanitarian crises to date. The perios is marked by food shortages, insecurity, and the gradual disappearance of what little shelter remains.

HumAngle reached out to both the Borno State Police Command and the State Government spokesperson for comments regarding the increasing cases of abductions targeting returnees in Dalori and the humanitarian distress in Muna Kumburi. At the time of filing this report, no official response had been received. 

Abduction cases are rising

After Boko Haram members abducted and killed her husband in 2019, Maryam Indi fled her hometown of Goniri Kadau in Konduga local government of Borno State.

Accompanied by her family, she fled to Maiduguri, the capital city, settling at the Kawar Maila camp for displaced people. She lived there for about six years until the government shut down the camp in 2023 and repatriated her and all other occupants to the 1,000 Housing Units situated at Dalori village along the Bama–Maiduguri road. 

She now lives there with her six children, she says, and life has only grown more difficult and unbearable since their return.

The 55-year-old worked as a farm labourer but stopped this year when suspected Boko Haram members began kidnapping residents who were going to the fields.

Her father-in-law, Ba Modu, was taken just five days before, while returning from the farm in Lawanti, a remote village in Konduga. He was one of eight people abducted from the community when HumAngle visited on July 25.

“The kidnappers demanded ₦1 million per person, but we couldn’t raise the money,” she said.

The abductors warned that Ba Modu would be killed in a week if the ransom was not paid. Maryam says this isn’t the first time their family has suffered such an ordeal.

“We have had three other cases of abduction in our family since we were repatriated to this estate. We paid ₦400,000 to free them,” she recalled.

But now, there is nothing left to give. And the process to raise the money is nearly impossible for many families.

“We used to go around the neighbourhood collecting donations from people, like ₦200 here, ₦500 there. But this time, we couldn’t raise anything. Everyone is suffering,” Maryam told HumAngle.

Maryam now begs in the markets across Maiduguri to feed her children. She said her daughter had recently narrowly escaped an attempted kidnapping while fetching firewood. Her son, who was with her, became sick with shock after witnessing the incident.

“We are scared. We can’t even go outside without fear. We are just surviving on begging and prayers,” she said.

Women like Maryam now bear the brunt of farming-related risks. While farming is often considered a male-dominated occupation in the region, the current insecurity has pushed many men into hiding, leaving women to farm in distant and dangerous areas. 

“Our men are afraid to go. If they go, they’re targeted more. So we, the women, take the risk,” Maryam said.

Since 2021, the Borno State government has implemented a phased closure of displacement camps across Maiduguri, relocating IDPs to newly built housing units in their ancestral communities or nearby towns. The policy was premised on restoring dignity, reviving local economies, and reducing long-term aid dependency.

As part of the exercise, at least ten informal camps in Maiduguri have been shut down. The most recent was the closure of Muna IDP camp in May 2025, during which the state governor, Babagana Umara Zulum, oversaw the relocation of 6,000 displaced families.

The government said the decision was driven by rising issues of crime, drug abuse, and child exploitation within the camp. However, the transition has deepened the humanitarian burden for many, particularly those unable to relocate or access livelihoods.

For many returnees, the promise of stability and improved living conditions remains unfulfilled.

Yakaru Abbagana, 30, another returnee, fled Shettimari in Konduga and lived at the same camp with Maryam before being relocated to the Dalori estate. She now lives with her husband and eight children in what was meant to be a fresh start.

“I used to be a farmer. Now, my children and I beg for survival. Sometimes my children and I go three days without food,” she told HumAngle in a faint voice.

When HumAngle visited her for an interview, her brother, Mammadu, had been abducted ten days before while working as a farm labourer in Lawanti. As with Ba Modu, the captors are demanding ₦1 million. The family cannot raise it; their only asset is the house gifted to them through the resettlement scheme.

“We told them we don’t have that money. They told us to sell our house for his release. But if we do that, we’ll have no shelter. Nothing,” she said.

Yakaru’s family had faced abductions in the past, too.

“Two of my uncle’s children were kidnapped last year. We paid ₦500,000 each to get them out. But now, we have nothing. Only this house the government gave us,” she said.

The uncertainty and fear have left many families choosing between starvation and the risk of death. “We are just begging. That’s our only means now,” Yakaru said.

On July 25, Nagari Bunu’s younger brother, Mustapha Bukar, 20, was abducted while farming. Ngari told HumAngle that, in two days, their family managed to raise ₦900,000 out of the ₦1 million ransom through community donations. 

He added that their father had considered selling their tent to raise the money, but community members helped. “People came together to help. They said we shouldn’t sell the house,” Nagari said.

Mustapha was abducted alongside others, but he remains the only one in captivity as others have paid and regained their freedom. The captors did not set a deadline but made it clear that Mustapha would not be released until the full ransom was paid.

Muhammed Usman, 30, is a community representative of the repatriated families from Kawar Maila camp, overseeing about 400 households now living in Dalori. His account reflects a community on the verge of collapse.

“This year alone, more than ten people have been abducted from our community while trying to farm. At least eight are still in captivity. The total ransom demanded is over ten million naira,” Muhammed said.

He explains that farming is not only a livelihood but the only lifeline left for many. Yet the farmlands surrounding Dalori and other nearby farming areas have become hunting grounds for Boko Haram.

Each time their community members are abducted, they resort to crowdfunding as authorities or organisations do not support them in the process. Muhammad says they do it alone year in year-round. 

“We rely on neighbours to contribute what they can to rescue victims. But now, even that system is failing. We are all empty,” he told HumAngle.

According to locals interviewed by HumAngle, security presence is patchy. Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF) members are stationed in some areas, but vast stretches of farmland remain unprotected.

“The government helps by giving us these houses. But they don’t help when our people are kidnapped. No food, no aid, no security. We are on our own,” Muhammad said.

The displaced communities continue to appeal for urgent government intervention to address their growing insecurity, hunger, and lack of support in resettlement areas

Heavy rains have swept through Yola, the Adamawa State capital in northeastern Nigeria, causing a devastating flood that residents have described to HumAngle as the first of its kind.

The rain began around 1 a.m. and intensified as the hours passed. By 3 a.m., walls and houses had begun to collapse, with water sweeping into homes in the Shagari and Sabon Pegi areas. 

HumAngle visited the affected communities and found locals carrying their luggage and children so they could reach the highlands.

While some residents blame the flooding on heavy rainfall, others argue that it was caused by water released from a dam in the Bole area, located just a few kilometres away from the affected communities.

Adamawa had been earlier identified as one of the states in Nigeria likely to be affected by flooding in 2025. Following this, the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA), in collaboration with the Adamawa State government, conducted a sensitisation exercise in May to address the 2025 flood risks and promote coordinated responses to mitigate climate change effects in the state.

People living in flood-prone areas were said to be most affected. In Shagari phase 2, some of the access roads are also flooded. Pam Bature, a resident of the community, told HumAngle that the rain caused severe damage across the area. 

“We heard that homes were getting flooded around that time [3 a.m.], so we came out and saw houses submerged in water. We did our best to carry items within our reach and help people get to safety,” he said. 

Pam mentioned that the police came around 7 a.m. to survey the area. 

“They asked some questions, looked around the area, and left. The Red Cross people also came, but they said their vehicle could not access the area, so they turned around and drove off,” Pam added.

He also noted that while some Shagari residents were able to swim across, others are currently trapped in their houses as they are waiting for the water levels to subside. 

In Sabon Pegi, HumAngle observed that several homes were destroyed and others were submerged in water. While some people are trying to recover items from their flooded homes, others are counting their losses. 

HumAngle spoke to Jared Enock, a resident of Sabon Pegi, who lost a portion of his house in the flood. He explained that his family was woken up by a loud thud, and when he came out, he discovered that it was his wall that had just collapsed. 

“Water began to flow into the house with so much intensity the moment the wall fell. I gathered my children, and shortly after we ran out of the house, the living room collapsed with all our properties inside,” Enoch said. 

Aside from his personal belongings and his gadgets, Jared also lost all his animals, which include chickens and rabbits. He is grateful that his family made it out alive. 

HumAngle learned that two people were swept away in Sapon Pegi. The victims were said to be children whose bodies were recovered by the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA). The agency has not yet released a statement about the flooding disaster.

Naomi Wazumtu, another resident of Sabon Pegi Yola, is still in shock. She said she never imagined that what began as an ordinary rainfall could result in a catastrophic flood. 

“My whole house is flooded. My bags of rice, maize, and all the foodstuffs in my store were submerged,” she said, sighing heavily. 

In the Ibunu Abbas community, also known as Yola bypass, the situation is worse. Locals told HumAngle that NEMA officials came with a rescue vehicle and pulled out six dead bodies. 

Four of the bodies were of men who were said to be workers in a bakery. The other two were children found alongside a drainage system. The bodies have been deposited at the morgue in the Moddibo Adamawa Teaching Hospital, Yola. 

On the flooded streets of Ibunu Abbas, people are seen running around, calling out for their children and loved ones who are still missing. HumAngle also observed dead animals on the streets.

While residents across the affected communities are grappling with the tragedy, their basic concern is shelter and food. 

“I’m not just looking for where my family can rest our heads right now,” Jared from Sabon Pegi said. 

Grace Shombolki from Ibunu Abbas, whose entire kitchen was submerged by the flood, says her major concern is food and shelter. 

“NEMA came, carried dead bodies, and left. We are calling on them and the government to come to our aid because we lost everything,” she said. 

Residents of Maiduguri, capital of Borno State, North East Nigeria, who live near the Alau Dam and its downstream channel, are in a state of confusion, grappling with conflicting government directives on the dam’s water release. The mixed messages are sparking widespread concern over potential flood risks.

The conflicting messages from these two key government bodies have left residents uncertain about the immediate danger and the appropriate course of action. While the Chad Basin Development Authority (CBDA) suggests a controlled release of the dam that shouldn’t cause panic, the State Emergency Management Agency (SEMA) is demanding immediate evacuation, indicating a potentially serious flood threat.

“We really don’t know which warning or advisory to follow now,” said Yunus Isa, a resident whose house was submerged in the devastating September flood last year. “I hope we will not be left in the darkness about reality until it is too late.”

The September flood resulted from the breakdown of the Alau Dam after years of neglect and warnings that the flood would happen. It swept through several local government areas of Borno State and affected about one million residents, according to the emergency management agency. HumAngle investigations found money trails that were allocated to the repair of the dam over the years, yet the repairs never happened.

This Wednesday, the CBDA announced the opening of the Alau Dam’s spillway gates to release water downstream. In a special announcement, they tried to calm fears, stating, “The general public should note that the spillway gates of the Alau Dam have been opened for water in the reservoir to spill downstream steadily… people, especially those living within the River Ngadda and Gwange area, should not panic by seeing the water passing through its normal way.” 

CBDA’s Executive Director for Engineering, Engr. Mohammed Shettima, who signed the statement, added that the authority would keep monitoring the dam’s activities until water levels recede.

However, SEMA has issued an urgent public notice concerning the dam’s water release with a stern directive: “Evacuate Immediately: All communities and individuals living or working near the Gadabul River and its tributaries must relocate to higher ground without delay.” SEMA further cautioned against approaching riverbanks, citing “strong currents and sudden surges” as “life-threatening hazards,” and advised residents to secure property and stay informed through local media.

When contacted for clarity, Borno State Permanent Secretary for Information and Internal Security, Aminu Chamalwa, stated that his ministry has reviewed both press statements and will address the matter on Friday to prevent any miscommunication.

The current confusion over the Alau Dam’s water release comes nearly a year after its catastrophic collapse and months after the Federal Government inaugurated a significant reconstruction project. The Federal Ministry of Water Resources and Sanitation held a groundbreaking ceremony in March this year for a crucial ₦80 billion project to reconstruct, dredge, and upgrade the vital infrastructure. However, despite that formal flag-off, nearly 120 days later, no significant work has reportedly been done on the dam.

It is July 18, around 7 a.m., and a group of women carrying malnourished children are gathered at the primary healthcare centre in Adamawa State, northeastern Nigeria, to receive free supplements for their children. While waiting for the weekly distribution to commence, they interact with one another. 

Moments later, a healthcare staff member in a white uniform with a blue check yells from the opposite direction: “There is no RUFT supplement today. Go home and come back next week.”

Disappointed, the women place their babies on their backs and disperse in different directions. 

Twenty-three-year-old Aisha Adamu, a resident of the Ngurore community, where the primary healthcare centre is located, is one of the women who are returning home without the supplements. Aisha relies on the RUFT supplement as a primary meal for her malnourished daughter. 

“She has been suffering from malnutrition since she clocked 1 year. I have seen improvement since I started feeding her the supplement,” Aisha tells HumAngle. She is devastated because she has to look for an alternative meal for her malnourished baby, as the facility is facing a shortage of RUFT supplement. 

Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food, also known as RUFT, is an essential supplement used for treating malnourished children under the age of five. RUFT paste consists of powdered milk, peanuts, butter, vegetable oil, sugar, and a mix of vitamins and minerals. A sachet contains 500 calories and micronutrients. 

The crisis 

In 2023, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reported that growing inflation, climate change, insecurity, and displacement impacted child malnutrition in Adamawa. That year, about half a million children were treated for acute malnutrition in UNICEF-supported facilities in Adamawa, Borno, and Yobe states. The number reflected a 37 per cent increase from 2022, highlighting how severe malnutrition was endangering children’s survival and development in North East Nigeria.

Ngurore, a community in Yola South, grapples with a severe child malnutrition crisis. The community hosts victims of displacement from the Michika and Madagali Local Government Areas (LGA). The primary healthcare centre in Ngurore offers clinical services to residents, the displaced population, and people from outside the community. 

To address the malnutrition crisis, organisations such as the Helen Keller Foundation, UNICEF, USAID, and MSF are collaborating with primary healthcare facilities, offering free health screenings and providing RUFT supplements to malnourished children.

Ahmed Mshelia, the data clerk at the Ngurore primary healthcare centre and one of the key facilitators of the malnutrition unit, expressed concern over the soaring malnutrition cases in the facility. Ahmed is not sure whether the centre can handle the number of people relying on it for aid. 

“Apart from residents of Ngurore and the IDPS living here, we also have women from Fufore and sometimes Numan LGA coming here to collect free supplements for their malnourished children,” he said. 

The facility attends to malnourished children every Friday. 

“So we have new cases and then revisit cases. The new cases come to register for the first time, while the revisit cases have already been registered, so they turn up weekly for the supplements,” he explained, noting that the facility records an average of five to six new cases weekly, which puts it at 20 to 22 new cases monthly; so far, there are over 50 revisit cases.  “We refer severe cases to bigger hospitals.”

At the centre, the RUFT was distributed according to each child’s weight. If available, the women could go home with at least 14 sachets every Friday. Aisha Abdullahi, a 38-year-old mother, received at least 14 sachets of RUFT supplement each week for her daughter, who is one year and ten months old. Aisha set aside two sachets for each day, ensuring that the 14 sachets would last her daughter for the entire week.

“I feed her with the supplement twice a day, morning and evening, then complement it with any available food,” she told HumAngle. 

In February, Felix Tangwami, Adamawa State’s Commissioner for Health and Human Resources, noted in a report that insecurity accounts for the high malnutrition rates in the state as farmers have limited access to their farms, which, in turn, results in reduced food availability.

Parents of malnourished children in Fufore told HumAngle that inflation is the primary cause of malnutrition in their community, as their husbands can barely afford three meals a day for their households.

Ahmed stated that many women who visit the centre lack sufficient breast milk, a situation he attributed to poor feeding practices, which consequently impacts the health of their children. For Amina Abdullahi, a 35-year-old mother of six from Ngurore, the primary healthcare centre is assisting her 2-year-old twins in overcoming malnutrition. In addition to the twins, she has another son at home who is also malnourished.

Amina registered the three children at the facility in February and has seen improvement in their weight. However, with the shortage in RUFT supply, she’s worried about their recovery process, which seems to be taking too long. According to Ahmed, the RUFT treatment is expected to run for eight weeks nonstop, but right now, it’s impossible to stay on track as parents struggle to keep up due to inconsistent supply. He explained that the women get the RUFT supply for at least four weeks out of the required eight. 

Amina expressed concern over the country’s inflation rate. The ongoing shortage of RUFT supplies leaves her anxious about feeding her malnourished children due to insufficient food at home. 

“Feeding is difficult compared to the past. Everything is now expensive, but we thank God for everything,” she said. 

Less aid

In May, HumAngle reported that the withdrawal of humanitarian agencies dependent on USAID funding in Nigeria affected displaced populations relying on them for essential services. This suspension was said to have deepened the humanitarian crisis in the northeastern region. 

The primary healthcare centre in Ngurore, which previously collaborated with agencies like USAID, is now feeling the impact of their withdrawal as the child malnutrition situation in the region is worsening. 

Ahmed explained that the facility’s aid from civil society groups has significantly dropped this year compared to previous years. For example, the primary healthcare centre, which used to receive hundreds of RUFT cartons from UNICEF, now gets only about 30. 

As a result, the facility now distributes the supplements bi-weekly, unlike in the past when they were shared weekly.

“The supplements are scarce, and it is required that the children keep up with the treatment once they start, but due to a shortage in supply, we sometimes skip a week or two in distribution, which affects their recovery,” Ahmed noted. 

He added that in the past, the organisations the clinic partnered with not only gave RUFT supplements to the malnourished children but also provided complementary drugs. “They give them deworming tablets like albendazole and sometimes malaria tablets and even distribute free test kits.” The situation has changed, as they only get RUFT supplements, and even the supplements are scarce. “We try our best, and if there’s a constant supply of commodities, then we won’t have problems catering for the children.”

Ahmed is worried about the recovery of the children, stressing that since aid is shrinking and RUFT supply has declined, he had advised parents of the malnourished children to augment the supplement with other complementary meals. 

HumAngle spoke with Umeh Chukwuemerie, a medical officer in the department of pediatric surgery from the Moddibo Adama University Teaching Hospital, Yola. He explained that children under the age of five require good food to develop their brain and motor skills.

“The child is growing, so he needs all the nutrients he can get to be fully developed because this is the stage where he is rapidly growing and his brain is still developing,” Umeh said. He stated that once malnutrition sets in, continuous treatment is crucial; otherwise, the affected child will become stunted, more susceptible to other diseases, and may develop poor social skills that might affect their confidence in the long run. 

Trading hope

In 2022, HumAngle reported the abuse and sale of RUFT supplements in Maiduguri, Borno State capital, at the price of ₦150 per sachet. The reports showed how parents went as far as inducing their children with portions to pass watery stool, which makes them shed weight and then qualify them to obtain the supplements that they [parents] end up selling. 

This sale of RUFT supplements, though fueled by poverty, has been termed illegal. 

Amidst the scarcity, HumAngle found that some of the women in Adamawa also end up selling the supplement they get to local traders due to pressing hunger in their households.

In front of an old motor park known as Tashan Njuwa in Numan LGA, *Babagana balanced his wheelbarrow at the Park’s entrance, where he displayed his wares. Among the biscuits, sweeteners, and other items he was selling, there were scattered sachets of RUFT supplements.

When asked for the price, he said, each sachet costs ₦400. According to him, he buys a sachet at the price of ₦300 from his suppliers and then sells it to hungry adults for ₦400, making a profit of ₦100. 

As Babagana explained, these suppliers are women who receive the supplement for their malnourished children from centres specialising in child malnutrition care across the state. However, he revealed that some healthcare workers sometimes bring the supplement to him. 

He has been selling RUFT supplements for over two years now, and while business has boomed in the past because he sold about 30 pieces or more in a week, the suppliers have barely shown up lately. 

“I heard that there is scarcity, and the ones I have will soon finish, but I might get some in the coming week,” he said, stressing that his RUFT customers are mostly older people. “They buy it as a quick meal. Then they mix it with boiling water and take it as pap.” 

However, Umeh insisted that malnourished children require the RUFT supplement the most, and there is no medical explanation for adults taking it. “It is not supposed to be sold commercially. RUFT is sent directly to primary healthcare centres but ends up in the wrong hands sometimes, which is sad,” he said. 

Ahmed added that some of the women in the community gather the supplements and sell them in large quantities while others sell one at a time.  “We hear them whispering amongst themselves sometimes,” he revealed, stating that some women sell half of what they receive weekly at the healthcare centre and use the remaining half to feed the malnourished children.

“When we tried to sensitise them on why they shouldn’t compromise on their children’s health one time, a woman explained that ten sachets fetched her ₦4,000 at ₦400 each, which she used to procure rice, beans, and other groceries that fed the whole family for a couple of days.”

While he’s aware of the food scarcity and inflation in town, Ahmed urges the women to desist from selling supplements, as this hinders the quick recovery of their children, especially at a time when aid is declining. 

While RUFT is currently scarce, organisations like the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations, with support from the government of Norway, are stepping up with alternative supplements like Tom Brown, a locally produced flour mixed with grains to prevent relapse in the malnourished children of the Ngurore community. 

“Distribution will start soon, and we are grateful. However, I fear that they might start selling this one too,” Ahmed said. 

*Alfred Silas just turned 18. 

He has been in commercial farming for five years. Working on people’s farms for daily wages from the age of 13, he prides himself on a recent promotion to farm manager, one that comes with many responsibilities and a higher wage. 

Lately, he wakes up by 6:00 a.m., hangs his hoe on his shoulder, and strolls to the farm while his younger ones prepare for school. 

A resident of Imburu village in Adamawa State, northeastern Nigeria, Alfred is a final-year student at the Government Day Secondary School, Imburu. While his schoolmates all over the country are preparing for the West African Examination Council (WAEC) and the National Examination Council (NECO) that will qualify them for admission into a university, Alfred hasn’t been in school for about a month now. 

He will also stay out of school for months to come because a different path has been paved for him, a path he accepts with honour. 

Unlike many teenagers in his community who abscond from school to engage in farm labour for quick cash, Alfred was pressed into commercial farming by the weight of family responsibility. From the start of every rainy season in June to the harvest period in September, an average of three months, he stays out of school to work in rice fields. 

“I put school on hold during every farming season so that I can work on people’s farms, earn money, and contribute to household expenses, and besides, my younger siblings are relying on me to take care of them,” he told HumAngle with a distant smile.

Alfred believes his parents don’t make enough money, so when they brought the idea of commercial farming five years ago, he jumped at the offer and has since grown into it. He explained that he had been contributing to household expenses from the age of 13, and now that he is older and has assumed the role of a farm manager, his contribution to household expenses has doubled. 

If he weren’t doing this work, Alfred said, he would like to be in school so he could study to become a doctor like he always wanted. 

While his hard work yields fruits to make ends meet, HumAngle observed that the wages are little compared to what he and many children from other rural communities in Adamawa deserve. 

Farming between lessons 

Seventeen-year-old *Philip Pwanidi is also a final-year student at the Government Day Secondary School in Imburu. 

Philip wakes up as early as 4:00 a.m., and then treks for about 30 minutes from home to the outskirts of the community where the farm he labours on is located. 

“I try my best to balance commercial farming with school,” he told HumAngle. 

“The first thing I do when I get there is turn on the generator so that it can power the water pump, then I head back home and dress for school.”

He stays in school for an average of two hours (8:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m.). The school grants an hour of refreshment break from 10:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m., so Philip rushes back to the farm in his uniform. There, he changes into his work clothes and carries on with farm labour. 

HumAngle spoke to another teen who does commercial farming in a neighbouring community called Zangun, a fertile land under the Numan Local Government Area (LGA) where urban dwellers come to set up farms and hire locals to manage and cultivate. Fifteen-year-old *Betty Godwin is a junior student at the Government Secondary School in this community. 

She has just been contracted to work in a rice field alongside some older women. Betty comes to the farm around 7:00 a.m., works for five hours and takes a break at noon. Then she resumes around 1:00 p.m. and finishes by 3:00 p.m. 

Currently, her work involves transplanting rice in a waterlogged field, and payment is made daily, at the end of every working hour. 

More work, less pay 

It’s been a year since Alfred became a farm manager for his contractor, who doesn’t live in Imburu. While he supervises other young workers in cultivating the lands, he also works. 

Alfred explained that he went to work on the contractor’s rice farm at least five times a week last year, from 5:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. 

He didn’t get a dime until after three months. 

“My contractor said he was going to pay me at the end of the harvest season, and I agreed. So the planting season to harvest season took three months, and that was when I got my pay,” he said.

Alfred received the sum of ₦100,000 and a bag of rice as compensation for his three months’ labour of over 10 hours daily.

“We harvested over 100 bags of rice. The farm is big, as you can see,” he said,  pointing at the vast land surrounding him. 

He also added that during the harvest, he stayed on the farm for over three days without bathing. He ate there and had to keep awake because his role also included serving as a farm guard.

The harvest period lasted for three and a half days, after which Alfred went home. Now, he has been contracted for the same job with the same terms. He commenced his 10-hour daily labour in June and will be settled in September. 

Philip and other children who are into commercial farming in Imburu are paid ₦1,000 or ₦1,500 per rice bed. 

“If you’re working on two beds a day, that’s ₦2,000 or ₦3,000,” he said.  

Philip explained that as children, they don’t get the chance to negotiate because their payment is fixed. He stressed that it’s nearly impossible for him and the other kids to work on two or more beds in a day, so they mostly do one bed.

He said it takes an average of five hours to cultivate one bed due to its size, and since he’s farming between lessons, he cultivates a bed daily.  

“Sometimes, I come here around 10:00 a.m. and leave by 4:00 p.m. I take out ₦500 from my daily earnings to buy food, and then I go home with ₦1,000, but it’s not even up to that amount all the time because the work always leaves us fatigued, so we buy pain killers, which cost like ₦200, and then go home with ₦800,” Philip said. 

Philip also stated that it’s quite difficult to work daily. “I get tired, so I skip a day or two,” he said. He shows up an average of four times a week and makes about ₦6,000. If he takes out the ₦500 he spends on feeding daily, he smiles home with ₦4,000 a week. He is proud of his earnings, and he is saving them as pocket money.

For adult commercial farmers, the situation is different. In Imburu, HumAngle gathered that adults are paid an average of ₦3,000 daily despite cultivating the same bed size as the children. 

Children like Philip are worried by the pay gap, but he says he has no choice but to accept what he gets.  

“There are so many of us [children] lining up to do this work, and sometimes, if you don’t show up on time, there’s always someone to take up your place. The contractors don’t negotiate. You take it or leave it,” he said, emphasising how competitive it can be. 

Most of the large-scale farmers who are the contractors come from urban centres like Ngbalang, Numan, and Yola. 

Despite working the same 10 hours as older women on the same rice farm in Zangun, Betty is paid ₦1,000, while the women get triple the amount. For instance, 35-year-old Pwataksino Hakuri, Betty’s co-worker and commercial farmer with four years of experience, told HumAngle that she receives ₦3,500 at the end of every successful day. This shows a disturbing wage gap. 

The Child Rights ACT of 2023, a legislation that protects children and young adults in Nigeria, frowns at the engagement of children in any form of labour that is harmful to their development. While the minimum age for employment is 15 years, it was stated that the work must not interfere with the children’s education.

The ACT also condemns all forms of exploitative labour, as some of the provisions state that no child must be employed as a domestic help outside the home or domestic environment. No child must lift or move anything heavy that might affect their physical health or social development, and no child must be employed in an industrial setting that is not registered as a technical school or similar approved institutions.

While the lack of implementation of the Child Rights Act is a major concern, inflation and poverty, among other reasons, were identified as reasons for the growing child labour and continuous exploitation of children in Nigeria.

HumAngle interviewed Joniel Yannam Gregory, a large-scale farmer in Adamawa State. With a major focus on rice farming, he has grown maize, cotton, guinea corn, sweet potato, and soya beans on a large scale across several local government areas in the last four years. 

Speaking on the exploitation that children face from large-scale farmers, Joniel said, “They are cost-friendly. I mean, children can accept whatever pay that is given to them at the end of the day without complaints.” He also added that children give less trouble to the farmers and demand less welfare, as they are not fed on-site by the contractors like adults.

“Children can also work and agree to receive their pay at a much later date than adults who have bills to pay and will want their payment instantly,” Joniel said. 

Addressing the pay gap, Joniel said it’s mainly due to the absence of a definite payment plan between farm contractors, labourers, and managers.

“However, it is also pertinent to note that, even if there are no definite payment plans, the amount of work done by the labourers and the size of land worked on are strong determinants of how a person is paid, whether he’s a child or not,” he said.

Despite the wage gap, Betty is satisfied with her payment. “I live with my grandmother. She’s old and can’t do anything to generate income, so at the end of every day, I take what I make to her,” she said. But she wants to be in school.

“I want to be a nurse. I don’t like this work. I don’t like missing school, but I have no choice,” she said, emphasising the strain of survival. 

But education is free

At the Government Day Secondary School in Imburu, the school administrators are worried about the declining number of students during every farming season. In an interview with HumAngle, Satina Phineas, the school principal, said the situation is worsening. 

“Before, the students in this community usually skip school during every rainy season, but now that irrigation farming is becoming a trend, they also skip school during the dry season,” she said.

Satina said the hustle for quick cash has caused a lot of children to derail from school despite the government’s provision of free education in the state. 

In  2019, Ahmadu Fintiri, the Governor of Adamawa State, announced free education across all public schools in the state. This has since taken effect. Students across primary and secondary schools only pay a token as a parent-teacher association (PTA) levy. Even WAEC and NECO fees are sorted by the government. 

According to the principal, students pay the sum of ₦640 per term as PTA levy, which amounts to ₦1920 each school year.  “The government has cleared their fees. The teachers are here, but they don’t show up,” she lamented.

She also stressed that some of the students get dressed from home but don’t go to school. They go to the commercial farms, then change into their work clothes when their parents think they are in school. She added that the school sanctions defaulters, but despite continuous efforts, the situation remains the same. 

In Zangun Primary and Secondary School, the classes are scanty. 

Onisimun Myakpado, the assistant head teacher at the primary school, explained that the management went as far as organising a workshop to sensitise parents in the community about the relevance of education. 

“The parents contribute to the absence of children from the school because some of them send the children to go and work on these farms,” he said. 

A fact sheet on Nigeria’s education, developed in 2023 by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), shows how rural and poor children in Nigeria at all levels have below-average school completion rates in comparison to urban and wealthier children, whose completion rate is above average. The report further states that while 90 per cent of children from the wealthiest quintile complete senior secondary education, less than 16 per cent of children from the poorest quintile do so.

“Education is the only thing parents can give their children as a lifetime inheritance,” said Satina. “If these parents don’t support their children to take advantage of the free education scheme, then they are cheating themselves.”

Esther Simon* is a 41-year-old woman from Imburu. Some of her teenage children are into commercial farming. According to her, commercial farming is an option for the children in her household who have no passion for education and don’t do well at school.

“It’s better if they go to the farm and hustle for money since they don’t do well in school,” she told HumAngle.

Esther also has little faith in the educational system and is worried about the unemployment rate in the country. “I know people who drop their certificates and venture into farming because there is no work, so it’s not entirely a bad thing if the children are into commercial farming,” she said.

However, she acknowledged that formal education and commercial farming combined will equip one for a better future.

“It will be great if we have a system here that allows the children to go to school during the day and then do commercial farming in the evening or during weekends,” she added. 

*The asterisked names are pseudonyms we have used to protect the identities of the sources.

No one recalls the road to Wawa. New detainees are blindfolded several kilometres ahead. Inmates are also blindfolded and driven out before release. 

It was July 27, 2021. Eleven people returning to South East Nigeria after the trial of Nnamdi Kanu, leader of the separatist group Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), at the Federal High Court, Abuja, were intercepted by the Department of State Services (DSS) along Lokoja. (IPOB has been fighting to secede the southeastern region to the independent nation of Biafra.) Labelled members of IPOB’s armed wing, known as Eastern Security Network, the travellers were taken into a dark, underground DSS cell in Abuja. A few weeks later, they were paired out before daybreak and chained ahead of a “military investigation.” 

Nonso and Pius Awoke landed in the Wawa prison, a military detention facility in North Central Nigeria.

Nonso, in his final year, was studying computer science at the Ebonyi State University, and Pius practised law in Akwa Ibom State. On the night they arrived in prison, they said they were first stripped by soldiers and beaten with cables. Nonso got the registration number 3220, and Pius, 3218.

Located in Niger State, the Wawa prison complex is shrouded in mystery. Except for an October 22 attack by the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), almost nothing is public about it. Even the specific location of its housing facility, the Wawa Cantonment, is a subject of disagreement. Some reports trace it to Wawa town, others say it’s in Kainji or New Bussa, which, though geographically related, are different communities in the state. 

HumAngle combined Open-Source Intelligence and satellite imagery to locate it. It is situated along the Kainji-Wawa highway, roughly 3 – 4 km east of Wawa town and another 3 –4 km west of the Nigerian Air Force Base in New Bussa. It is accessible from both towns within 4 to 6 minutes by vehicle, depending on road conditions. 

Far left into the sizable military installation on Wawa-Wakwa Road, between Wawa town and Tamanai village in the Borgu Local Government Area (LGA), is a collection of buildings that closely match the description of two sources. The nine two-storey blocks separated by double walls are the prison complex, designated ‘A’ to ‘I’.

“Each floor contains 10 cells,” Pius said. “In every cell, there are 15 inmates, making approximately 450 per block.”

The military prison primarily holds suspected members of Boko Haram, which has terrorised Northern Nigeria for 16 years and killed at least 20,000 people. In 2017, a court set up in the cantonment tried 1669 suspects behind closed doors, convicted some and awarded prison terms ranging from three to 60 years. ISWAP’s attack on the facility later was to liberate their incarcerated members, but they lost eight more men instead, including a commander, to a joint force of local vigilantes and soldiers. 

United by fate

The largest groups in Wawa are tied to terrorism in the north, militancy in the middle belt, and secession threats in the South East. Most of the Igbo inmates were picked up after the nationwide #EndSARS protests of October 2020, sources said. During the protest, which started as a peaceful demonstration against police brutality, there were reports of IPOB-sponsored attacks on security personnel in Obigbo, Rivers State, which led to the declaration of a curfew and the invitation of the military by the then-governor Nyesom Wike. The soldiers, however, embarked on door-to-door raids, torture, rape, executions, arbitrary arrests, and disappearances of locals, especially men. 

“Thirty-four of them were taken to Wawa,” said Nonso. “Some of them were conductors and drivers going about their businesses. One of them was arrested for having a tattoo. They said he was an unknown gunman. One was even arrested for having a beard. One of my brothers from Rivers State, his offence was that he greeted a soldier.”

The rest came from Anambra and other southeastern states. Emeka Umeagbasi, whose organisation, Intersociety, sent an undercover agent to Wawa while compiling a report in 2024, confirmed this. 

“In our recent report, there’s a declassified document showing a request by the Nigerian Army for the transfer of so-called Boko Haram and IPOB terrorist suspects from the police headquarters to Wawa Military Cantonment,” he told HumAngle. “What else is more evidential?”

The events that culminated in the incarceration of a large number of Tivs in Wawa began with a peace meeting in the Katsina-Ala LGA  of Benue State on July 29, 2020. Politicians, chiefs, and religious leaders gathered in Tor-Donga, the Tiv people’s capital, to settle years of “armed robbery, kidnapping, murder, rape, and other criminal acts” connected to Terwase Akwaza, also known as Gana, a notorious militia leader who had been in hiding. The team requested amnesty for Gana and his gang members and offered an apology to Samuel Ortom, the governor at the time.

Though a known criminal, Gana was also a messiah in Sankera, the senatorial district covering Katsina-Ala, Logo, and Ukum LGAs. When the federal government appeared to be ignoring deadly armed herder incursions, it was Gana and his men who protected the people and their vibrant agricultural economy. Sankera, the location of Zaki Biam, the world’s biggest yam market, accounts for 70 per cent of Nigeria’s annual yam production. 

“Gana was employed by community leaders to defend the people against herders,” Jeremiah John*, a Sankera native, told HumAngle.

The militia leader bowed to pressure from traditional authority after the Tor-Donga summit. On September 8, 2020, he and his gang members publicly gave up their weapons and joined a convoy heading to Makurdi, the state capital, to conclude a peace deal with the governor. The military, however, intercepted the convoy, which included clergymen and community leaders, and took Gana and his gang members. News of his death would spread a few hours later. 

In a picture of his dead body later circulated on social media and seen by HumAngle, his body was bullet-ridden, and his right arm had been severed from his body.

On Facebook, HumAngle saw a petition addressed to the National Human Rights Commission in November 2020, seeking the release of 76 surrendered militants arrested with Gana. Tor Gowon Yaro, the Benue State native who signed the petition, told HumAngle that the men were still in military detention. 

“None of them has been released,” he said. “None that I’m aware of.”

Suspected terrorists are the largest single group in Wawa. About a decade ago, Boko Haram took over communities in the Banki axis of Borno State and held residents hostage. Upon a counter-operation by the military, the terrorists fled. However, soldiers claimed that the villagers were complicit and drove hundreds of them to the Bama IDP Camp, where they separated the men and took them to military detention. This happened in several other villages, and residents who also tried to escape their terrorised villages to Maiduguri, the capital city, were often intercepted and detained. 

“Half of Borno youths, especially the Kanuris, are in detention,” Pius cried. 

Other demographics in the facility are Fulani men detained over kidnapping, underage boys, and even some mentally-challenged people arrested in Maiduguri and accused of being Boko Haram members, sources said. 

HumAngle has extensively documented this arbitrary detention problem in Borno, involving thousands of men who have been detained for about a decade now, prompting their female relatives to form the Knifar Movement to advocate for their release. Though they are periodically released in batches, many are still in detention. HumAngle has confirmed the release of at least 1009 men from the Wawa prison and the infamous Giwa barracks in Maiduguri.

Behind the prison walls

“Once you’re inside, you’re inside,” said Onyibe Nonso, an undergraduate who spent nearly three years in the facility. The cell door quickly shuts after letting in food, and the special day when inmates step out for sunning may not come in a whole year. To survive, you must first accept every cellmate, no matter their tendency or ideology, including terrorists and mentally ill people.

Every day is a routine, Pius said – wake up, pray, sit down. Sometimes, you gist with fellow inmates. Other times, cellmates play the Ludo board game among themselves. Some cells have Hausa literature supplied by the Red Cross, where one could read. Since no single meal in the facility can satisfy an adult, many have formed the habit of fasting every day until evening, when they combine the meals and drink the little water available. 

“If they gave us beans, you would not see a single seed, only water,” said Pius. He also recalled having no water to bathe for a whole month. 

The toilet and bathroom carved out of each cell, the same cell that is smaller than the average bedroom and still accommodates belongings like jerricans, has no door. 

“We shared the rest of the space,” said Nonso. “To sleep, each person would place their blanket on top of their mat and leave a small space in-between.”

You stand and sit in your small portion. On the evenings when inmates squabble over space, they quickly resolve before soldiers return in the morning. It must not escalate lest they all suffer the following day. 

Conditions generally improve when the Red Cross visits, but soldiers assure inmates of a return to the old ways. 

“And truly, things would return,” said Pius. “For over a year before I was released, the Red Cross did not come. We heard that it was because the military authorities mismanaged the things they brought.”

An information blackout tops Wawa’s many woes, according to Pius.

“I didn’t know they changed money,” he said, referring to the time when Nigeria redesigned the naira note.  “I didn’t know whether a relative was dead or not. We didn’t know Tinubu was running. We didn’t know who was going to be sworn in – just like I was completely excommunicated.”

Back home, families were struggling to move on. When Nonso’s mother heard his voice for the first time in three years, she called back to make sure it wasn’t just another fantasy. It was on June 21, 2024, the day he was released. After two months in the hospital, 20 bags of drips and a lot of prayer, she was already making peace with her only son’s death.

And death is truly cheap in the military prison. From beatings, starvation, and complications arising from inadequate healthcare, inmates die randomly. When the undercover agent from Intersociety arrived at the facility in September 2024, at least 10 inmates had just died within the week. 

“A Muslim lieutenant colonel from the north, who provided us with 10 names of people who had just died in the detention that week, told our undercover, ‘Look at how your people are dying here,’” Umeagbasi told HumAngle. 

Nonso saw at least two dead bodies himself. Despite being rarely allowed to speak with inmates from other cells, Pius knew of at least 10 deaths. Earnest, one of those brought in from Port Harcourt shortly after the #EndSARS protests, died of complications related to diabetes. 

“I know him in person,” Pius told me. “We met one day.”

The more inmates die, the more new ones arrive. The total number, which Pius said matched his registration number on arrival, had climbed to over 5000 by his release in June 2024. As the number grows, so does the intensity of abuse.

“Some of those who got there before us said there was no such thing as beatings when they were brought in. We met it during our own time, and those who came after us had even tougher experiences. They sustained serious injuries and weren’t given adequate treatment,” Nonso said. An inmate who was released from the prison last year after 11 years in detention had an account similar to this. She told HumAngle that though the physical abuse was intense at the beginning of her stay there, it stopped at some point. Shortly before she was released, however, it resumed.

Many of the Tiv inmates arrested alongside Gana couldn’t survive the abuse they were subjected to, Pius revealed. “They beat them in a way that when they got to that detention [Wawa], most of them died.” 

Until their release over media pressure and advocacy efforts by the Nigerian Bar Association, neither Nonso nor Pius set foot in court, raising questions about why they were arrested in the first place.

The Red Cross and the Nigerian Army have not responded to inquiries sent to them.

*Jeremiah John is a pseudonym we have used to protect the source’s identity.