Since the government stopped humanitarian agencies from helping internally displaced persons, the elderly, particularly, but also some of the children, are dying daily from starvation.

RNI reporter Zainab Alhaji Ali visited Kawar Mailah IDP camp and spoke to some of the elderly, most of whom said that life was just getting “too hard”.

Halima Alhaji Kachallah said: “I’m 75 years old and I originally came from the Bama Local Government Area. I have been living in this camp for more than six years. When we stopped getting help from the humanitarian agencies, I started begging in the street. If I get money, I buy food for me and my four grandchildren who are orphans. We get no help. One of my granddaughters is married and has five children. But she is also poor and cannot help out.”

Kachallah said it was an exceedingly difficult life in the camp, especially for the elderly.

“Every morning I go to beg trying to get something so that we can put food in our mouths. A while back I injured my hand and needed to have surgery, which I could not afford. Thankfully, family members and friends contributed some money for surgery and medicine. But not all the elderly members in the camp are so lucky. Many have died of starvation.”

He said residents in the camp had not had humanitarian or government aid for about a year and a half.

“The only thing we can do is to beg. We depend on it. If we get money, it’s good, but if we don’t, we come back home and sleep with empty tummies. Some don’t wake up. I remember last month, we did not have food for almost a whole week. We were starving. Our neighbours helped me by giving us a little food, which I gave to the orphans.”

Kachallah said most of the elderly in the camp were poor and starving. He said some were dying because they did not have food. All of them were struggling, he said, adding that they urgently needed help from the government if they were to survive.

Hajji Gambo Marte, a blind man, said: “I came here from the Marte Local Government Area. I’m 90 years old and I don’t have any relatives. I had only one son and he was killed by insurgents, so I am all alone. I depend on begging to feed myself. The situation in which we live is critical.”

“Since I moved to this camp, 75 elderly people have died, mostly from starvation. Now there are only 35 elderly people in the camp,” said Modu Ari, an internally displaced person originally from the Konduga Local Government Area.

“In the past two weeks 10 elderly people died because they did not have food,” he said.

“Early every morning we go out to beg. Sometimes we go to the market to the place where they grind maize. We pick up the leftovers from the grinding that’s on the floor. We prepare the food but it is not clean and many of the elderly develop diarrhoea and that’s how some of them die.”

Ari said it was not just the elderly that were starving. “Yesterday I attended the funeral of two young boys who died from starvation. The boys did not have a carer and when they went to people’s houses to beg, they were kicked out.

“It is like that for all the people in the camp. At one time the Save the Children organisation used to come to the camp and distributed five bowls of maize each month to every family. But even that was not enough. I have eight children, how far do you think five bowls of maize will last? These days we are not getting even that help. It is not easy. And the prices of food have skyrocketed. We cannot afford to buy food. It’s just too expensive.”

Ari said sometimes when the elderly people went out to beg they could not find their way back to the camp. He said he didn’t know if it was just the hunger that made them forget or if they had some form of mental illness too.

“If we see them on the street, they sometimes appear disoriented. We have to bring them back to the camp. It’s shameful that people – particularly the elderly – have to live like this.”

Zainab Alhaji Ali