In Brief – The government has not kept its promise to provide healthy and essential food and, when it did help feed internally displaced persons in Maiduguri’s Teachers Village Camp, it arrived too late, there was not enough and it was often rotten.

IDPs told RNI reporter Fatima Grema Modu that the government had promised to give them 25kg of rice, cooking oil and seasoning. Instead they received 12.5kg of mostly decaying maize.

Residents said they had not received food assistance for two months. They wanted to reject and send back the food distributed by the National Emergency Management Agency, but they were hungry and had families to feed.

They said the long wait for food forced them to go out on the streets to beg. A resident, Bintu Zarami, said begging made them feel ashamed and also it was dangerous. “Some IDPs have been hit by vehicles and some have even died.”