Every day in Nigeria’s northeast, a region plagued for 14 years by armed conflict, more and more women are being brutally abused by their husbands and the number of cases of gender-based violence (GBV) is escalating alarmingly.

Many women are treated as sex slaves, suffer beatings every day and are eventually chucked out and divorced by the men they thought loved them.

Much of this disturbing behaviour is the result of marriage-for-food or “auren-kati” as the locals call it.

For more than a decade the northeast has been under siege. Millions of people, many of them women, were displaced, forced to flee as insurgents ruthlessly attacked their villages and towns. They ran for their lives and many of the internally displaced persons (IDPs) ended up in camps officially set up by the Borno State government.

But the government could not provide much-needed aid for the victims of the insurgency and international and local non-governmental organisations (NGOs), as well as other humanitarian agencies, stepped in.

Different agencies provided all kinds of life-saving aid assistance, including cash, food and essential items. Some also provided medical and psychosocial services to those who were the victims of the insurgents’ abhorrent acts.

However, lack of funding forced many humanitarian agencies to cut feeding programmes for the starving masses in 2017.

In 2021 the Borno State government shut down official IDP camps. Its reasoning was that relative peace had been restored and the IDPs were ready to return and resettle in their ancestral hometowns.

However, many of these communities were – and still are – being plundered by insurgents. Most of those who returned found devastated hometowns without adequate infrastructure. A lot of them stayed, trying to rebuild their lives. Others either did not resettle and stayed in unofficial IDP camps in host communities.

When the official camps were shut down, the government also banned humanitarian aid organisations from distributing food and essential items to those in need.

More than five million affected people had benefited directly or indirectly from aid assistance in the region.

During the peak of the aid assistance, from 2011 to 2019, many humanitarian organisations began distributing tokens to beneficiaries, which they could use to get money, for food and other essential items.

The organisations prioritised women because they were the most vulnerable. This did not go down well with some men, who believed that they were the entitled beneficiaries.

To get around this, between 2011 and 2019, men from host communities and within the IDP camps began dating – and marrying – women-led households. They weren’t in love with the women, they married them for their tokens. It was their way of getting food without having to work for it.

This practice became known as marriage-for-food or “auren-kati” by the locals.

Lucy D Yunana, the executive director of Women in New Nigeria and the Youth Empowerment Initiative, described the practice as a form of marriage in which a man engaged in a relationship and married a woman solely because of her tokens and nothing else.

The more tokens a woman had, the more men made advances to her – all in the name of “love”.

“Under this form of marriage, what really binds couples together are the tokens – there is no love involved,” she said.

The tokens lured many men, who were eager to scrap the women they really desired for those for whom they had no feelings but who could provide material comfort in the form of tokens.

“When I witnessed six weddings of this type [marriage-for-food] taking place at the same time in one community some years back, I told myself then that this would become a big problem in the future. I asked myself, what will be the fate of these marriages when there is no more aid? And here we are today,” Lucy said.

Balu Modu was a beneficiary of two humanitarian organisations before the aid was cut in 2017 and government banned the distribution of food and essential items in December 2021.

“I was a beneficiary of two international non-governmental organisations [iNGOs]. I received food, non-food essentials, cash and supplementary feeding for my children at the end of every month. Then, suddenly, we were told that there would be no more aid and that’s when our suffering really began.”

When Modu Kyari, Balu’s would-be husband, learnt that she had two tokens from different organisations he soon proposed and married her.

“We were living a lovely life before the aid cut. We had enough food to eat and money to spend. My husband was jobless, so we relied solely on the aid to survive. When the aid stopped, our crisis began.”

Since then Balu has been brutally abused by her husband, often in front of her children.

“We hardly have a normal conversation as husband and wife without him shouting at me. We are starving. He does nothing to help provide food for us. It is left for me to struggle and get whatever I can so that we can eat. He beats me frequently. Sometimes I have fallen down sick and sore because of it.

“I’m so tired of being beaten and crying in front of my own children. He doesn’t treat me as a wife, I’m more of a sex slave to him.

“I don’t want the marriage to last, but the problem is I don’t know where to go when he divorces me.

“I do not want to report him to human rights organisations because I am ashamed and do not want people to know what I am going through. But it got to the stage when I realised things were going from bad to worse. I am still with him. Things have improved slightly but my children and I are still starving.”

Fanta Modu, a divorcée who was displaced from her village in Borno State by armed-groups nine years ago, is another victim of token-marriage.

Three iNGOs helped her for a few years. She received tokens for cash, food and supplementary feeding for her two children each month until the interventions came to an end.

“I used to receive two to three marriage proposals every week, because they [men] knew I was a beneficiary of three iNGOs. The man who married me categorically told me that he wanted to marry me because of my tokens. I thought it was a joke – until I discovered that he meant it.”

The aid stopped four months after the marriage and he divorced Fanta three months later.

“We only stayed together for seven months. It was lovely in the beginning but the end was terrible. When I informed him the tokens had expired and there was no more aid, his reaction was scary. He never smiled at me again and then he divorced me.”

She believes the majority of women who were married just for their tokens are either divorced or suffering in silence like Balu.

Lying under a shed at Al Badawi camp was Mohammed Bukar, a displaced person from Mafa. He married two women just for their tokens. He divorced them when the aid stopped.

“I divorced two of them when there was no more aid. I don’t have a job, so I couldn’t feed them. I decided to let them go because I no longer had any reason for keeping them. I wanted to be a beneficiary but it was difficult because I was a man. That’s when I took the decision to marry women who were receiving tokens.”

Lucy believes that cases of GBV are still greatly underreported.

“When you see these women, you begin to understand that the brutality of their lives and the reason they often don’t report their abuse relates to culture and a lack of education. And fear – fear of what the men will do to them and fear because they do not know where they will end up.

“What do you expect from a jobless man who marries a woman only for her tokens? When the women were beneficiaries, their husbands considered them as an asset. When the aid stopped, they regarded their wives as liabilities. These types of women are exposed to all forms of physical, emotional and sexual violence.”

The women’s rights activist said she was extremely worried about the rise in GBV cases in the region.

“The increase in GBV cases in the northeast is alarming and the nature of the cases we deal with every day are even more disturbing. When I see and hear some of the stories, I become so disturbed that I even have to seek for counselling to help me cope.”

Women’s rights activists are doing their best to change the situation, she said, but their best is not enough.

“We want to do more, but we can’t do it alone and we need to be supported.”

MAMMAN MAHMOOD