Ten years of Boko Haram crisis has displaced nearly 22,000 Nigerians which makes the country come top in the list of countries with record of highest number of missing people in the World, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has said.
ICRC, in a statement noted that majority of those affected were minors at the time they went missing.
“Every parent’s worst nightmare is not knowing where their child is. This is the tragic reality for thousands of Nigerian parents, leaving them with the anguish of a constant search.
“People have the right to know the fate of their loved ones, and more needs to be done to prevent families from being separated in the first place,” the release quoted the ICRC President, Peter Maurer, as having said after a five-day visit to Nigeria.
ICRC noted that Families in northeast Nigeria are often separated while fleeing attacks adding that “others have had loved ones abducted or detained and do not know their whereabouts.
“What troubles me is that I haven’t heard whether he is dead or alive. I just don’t know. Whenever I cook food for his siblings, I think about him,” Falmata Amodu, the mother of a boy who went missing in 2013 at age 10 while fleeing an attack, told ICRC. “For the three years that we stayed in Maiduguri, my husband was very distressed and would repeatedly have nightmares. He would call the name of our abducted son, ‘Alkali, Alkali, Alkali’ all the time.”
ICRC, according to its record, about two million people are estimated to be displaced from their homes in northeast Nigeria.
The violent rise and resilience of the Boko Haram insurgents is posing enormous security, humanitarian and governance challenges in Nigeria.
In 2018, Global Terrorism Index placed Nigeria as the third most terrorised country in the world, for the fourth consecutive year but the Federal had on many occassions claimed the group had been defeated.