Bama - Nigeria's government has a
plan for the northeast, torn apart by eight years of conflict
with Boko Haram: displaced people will be housed in fortified
garrison towns, ringed by farms, with the rest of the
countryside effectively left to fend for itself.
The vision for the state of Borno, ground zero for the war
with the Islamist insurgency, is a stark admission of the
reality in the northeast.
For two years, the military and government have said Boko
Haram is all but defeated, and the remnants are being mopped up.
But the military is largely unable to control territory
beyond the cities and towns it has wrested back from Boko Haram.
That means many of the nearly 2 million displaced people across
the northeast cannot return to their homes in rural areas.
Kashim Shettima, the governor of Borno state, said it was
not possible for people to live in small villages.
"There's beauty in numbers, there's security in numbers. So
our target is to congregate all the people in five major urban
settlements and provide them with means of livelihood,
education, health care and of course security," he told Reuters.
"It's a long term solution, certainly."
The plan for the eastern part of the state, centred on the
town of Bama, is intended as a pilot scheme to be rolled out in
other parts of Borno if it is successful.
Vigilantes, currently members of a group known as the
Civilian Joint Task Force, will become agricultural rangers, the
governor said.
Aided by Nigerian security forces, they will aim to secure
and patrol a five-km (three-mile) radius around each garrison
town where people can farm.
PROTECTION
Peter Lundberg, the United Nations Deputy Humanitarian
Coordinator for Nigeria, who heads the organisation's response
in the northeast, said the reconstruction of Bama town, the
second biggest in the state, was "logical".
"People are very eager to go back if the conditions are
right and if the conditions are safe, if the conditions are
dignified, and of course it has to be voluntary," he told
Reuters.
Sentiment amongst the displaced is mixed.
Abubakar Goni, who lived outside Bama before fleeing to the
Borno state capital Maiduguri, said he wants to return home, but
if the town is safer he will agree to go there.
"I will support it as long as I will have a place to farm. I
am also happy to hear the government will give us protection on
the farm because I learnt Boko Haram men are still around."
Others, like Tijja Modu Alhaji, are wary of potential
disputes between residents of the towns where people will be
sent and the returnees.
"I don't want to stay in Bama because I will still be a
stranger there, just as I am in Maiduguri now," he said. "I want
to go home, not to somebody else's land."
The governor's plan is still in its early stages. It
involves bringing back thousands of people who fled the town of
Bama and the surrounding area and sought refuge in camps in
Maiduguri and elsewhere.
They will eventually be housed in towns such as Bama, which
was largely abandoned by its inhabitants when Boko Haram took it
three years ago, but has since been recaptured by the military.
Many of Bama's buildings are still shells, windows smashed,
doors ripped out and roofs gone. Telephone and electricity wires
remain torn down, more than two years after the military evicted
Boko Haram.
It is not clear how the returnees will be housed. There are
already 15,000 people in a crowded camp for displaced local
residents set up by the military after it retook the town.
The United Nations had planned to move them gradually to new
shelters accommodating 30,000 people that have been erected in
the town, but the military said it could not oversee two camps
there at the same time, UN and military officials told Reuters.
NEW HOMES
The government has announced plans to build 3,000 homes in
the Bama area. But there are concerns about how people sent to
the town will manage, since many did not originally live there.
"It's one thing to move people to Bama," said Lundberg.
"Unless the engine of the economy can restart, the risk is that
people are moving back to places where they will become very
dependent (on aid)."
Aid workers said the demarcation between garrison towns and
a lawless countryside means people have a choice: live in
virtual quarantine, or return to their homes in the countryside,
where Boko Haram roam, and be treated by security forces as
potential insurgency sympathisers.
"You're imprisoned, but you're safe," said one senior relief
worker, speaking on condition of anonymity. "If you prefer your
own life you can do it on the outside."
Boko Haram's recent attacks, including a suicide bombing
that killed at least 50 in a mosque in Adamawa state last week,
are the "last kicks of a dying horse," Nigeria's Information
Minister Lai Mohammed said last Sunday.
But military and diplomatic officials, speaking on condition
of anonymity, said overstretched troops are unable to push Boko
Haram out of non-urban areas. Much of Borno is not under the
authorities' control and attacks are rife.
On Saturday, suicide bombers killed at least 13 people in
the town of Biu and injured 53 others.
"Borno is not getting better at all. It may have even gotten
worse," a diplomat said of the security situation outside urban
areas. "There is no recovery and stabilisation."