Rethinking Resettlement and Return in Nigeria’s North East (Crisis Group Africa Briefing N°184. 16 January 2023)

What’s new? In Nigeria’s Borno state, authorities have embarked on an aggressive program of relocating civilians uprooted by more than a decade of conflict between the state and jihadist insurgencies. They have closed most camps where displaced people lived in the state capital, often causing them to move to unsafe areas.

Why does it matter? The hasty process is endangering displaced people’s lives — putting them closer to the fighting and cutting them off from support. By exposing civilians to hardship, the government risks giving jihadist groups an opportunity to forge ties with relocated communities and draw benefits from their economic activities.

What should be done? The government should suspend its camp closure policy in Borno, while taking measures to better protect those who have been relocated from harm, including by permitting NGOs to provide them with services and by allowing them to move to places they find more suitable.

I.Overview

The government agenda for the resettlement and return of internally displaced people (IDPs) in Nigeria’s Borno state is fraught with risk. A portion of those displaced by fighting involving jihadist militants have already resettled, but some 2.5 million remain uprooted from their homes, with 1.8 million of them in Borno. Over the past two years, the Borno state governor, Babagana Zulum, has tried to turn the page on the conflict by accelerating IDP relocation efforts. With federal support, he has been closing IDP camps and bringing home refugees who fled to neighbouring states to escape conflict. But he is moving too quickly. Jihadist groups operate near the sites to which some IDPs are being moved, often involuntarily. Lacking security, public services and cash, these people may feel impelled to engage economically with the insurgents. For the sake of both those at immediate peril and state security, authorities should suspend camp closures and focus on getting IDPs the support they need.

Borno state has been the epicentre of fighting between Nigeria and jihadist insurgents for thirteen years, and during that period has seen the most war-related displacement in the country’s north east. As recently as July 2022, Borno’s capital, Maiduguri, was home to more than 500,000 IDPs. The primary conflict has pitted federal and state security forces against the group widely known as Boko Haram, which in 2016 split into two rival factions. The Islamic State in West Africa Province (ISWAP), which has drawn support and counsel from the Islamic State’s (ISIS) core, is the larger and more powerful of the two, but the smaller faction, Jama’tu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad (JAS), also menaces civilians.

Nigerian and Borno state officials claim that they have the militants on the back foot, but reality is more complicated. It is true that the military’s air campaign has curtailed ISWAP’s room for manoeuvre — forcing it to abandon large-scale attacks that require it to mass forces, which can be bombed from above. But ISWAP remains a potent threat. In 2022, it claimed more attacks than in any previous year, and it controls significant territory on the shores and islands of Lake Chad, and in the Sambisa and adjoining forests. By providing rough justice, and therefore a modicum of order, in the territories it controls, encouraging trade and largely abjuring the brutality for which Boko Haram became notorious, it has positioned itself to win grudging cooperation from some of the residents.

Still, Borno state officials are understandably more than ready to move on from the long-running conflict and the humanitarian crisis it has spawned. Zulum, who was elected in 2019 and is rumoured to have his eye on national office, is particularly eager to put the state’s troubles behind it. He has promoted a narrative that Borno must progress quickly toward “stabilisation” in order to generate the economic development that will help the region prosper. He believes that “stabilisation” requires an aggressive effort to return IDPs to their homes, or resettle them, so that they can reintegrate into society. Zulum’s administration has closed all but one of Maiduguri’s IDP camps and announced that those in Borno’s secondary towns will start shutting down in January 2023. Some IDPs who lived in the now-closed camps have resettled in Maiduguri town, but some have been required — either by the state or by circumstances — to move to places close to ISWAP-held territory.

The places where IDPs are resettled tend to lack rudimentary health care, education and other state services.

The challenges facing IDPs in these relocation sites can be enormous. In November 2022, for example, ISWAP overran Mallam Fatori village, near the border with the Niger Republic, forcing the garrison to flee, killing civilians and driving some 6,000 IDPs across the border. Relocated IDPs often lack access to land and livelihoods, particularly if the jihadists’ proximity and the military’s curfews prevent them from venturing into the bush. Zulum has also constrained NGOs from providing support to newly relocated IDPs, arguing that aid fosters unhealthy dependency. The state offers relocation program participants a one-off payment, but it has not always disbursed the money in full, and IDPs who relocate from outside the formal camp system generally do not benefit. Meanwhile, the places where IDPs are resettled tend to lack rudimentary health care, education and other state services. Although relocated IDPs can travel for medical and other reasons, they are often blocked from pulling up stakes and moving.

Borno state’s IDP relocation agenda has moved too far, too fast. State and federal authorities should revisit the return and resettlement program both because it is coercive and puts IDPs in danger, in contravention of international norms, and because of the harm that it threatens to do to state security. ISWAP is already trying to use the vulnerability of relocated IDPs to its advantage — developing trading relationships and dangling the prospect of fishing and farming in areas it controls in an effort to broaden its tax base. Donors, civil society groups and other partners who work with the Nigerian government and Borno state authorities should urge the following steps to mitigate such risks:

• The Zulum administration should suspend camp closures until these can be conducted consistent with the state’s own Safe Return Strategy — ie, until there are credible plans to return or resettle their inhabitants in a manner that is safe, dignified, informed and voluntary, in compliance with international norms.

• Borno state should rescind restrictions on NGO support to relocated IDPs, turning its efforts to ensuring that vulnerable IDPs receive the assistance from these organisations that they require. Forums for coordinating such assistance efforts need to meet more frequently, and focus on removing obstacles to aid delivery, rather than acting as platforms for the government to brief outside actors.

• The state should increase its own assistance to IDPs who relocate, offering them a full year of support so that they can get better established in their new homes before they have to fend fully for themselves. To protect IDP livelihoods, the military should ensure that its officers do not use the resettlement areas’ scarce land and other resources for personal benefit; to the extent possible, access to fishing and farming sites should be preserved for IDPs.

• Federal and state authorities should also send more support and services to larger resettlement sites in towns away from the war zone so that these places can receive IDPs who are required to leave insecure locales. They should lift restrictions that might prohibit these and other IDP movements.

• State authorities should create channels for IDPs and humanitarian NGOs to report the problems that relocated individuals are facing so that these can be adequately addressed.

These steps may not move Borno state past the displacement challenges it faces as quickly as authorities would like. But neither will its current program. Redirecting its efforts in this way will allow the government to deal with the difficult situation it faces more humanely and effectively, and without the additional risks — to both human and state security — created by its present course.

Source: International Crisis Group