Families displaced by Boko Haram face starvation after being resettled in new Adamawa homes

For 55-year-old Luchit Daniel, memories of 2014 are permanently etched in pain. That year, Boko Haram insurgents stormed Kirawa, a village in the Gwoza LGA of Borno State, near the Nigeria-Cameroon border, brutally killing her two cousins.

Her younger brother disappeared in the chaos and has never been found.

“It’s painful, but I leave everything to God. What should I do?” she recounted, her voice heavy with unspeakable loss.

After fleeing the violence, Ms Daniel settled in Girei, Adamawa State, where she paid N25,000 annually for a single room. The small space with a leaky roof barely shielded her family, but it was all she could afford.

She said her children frequently travelled to Lagos for menial jobs to support the household.

So, when she heard early in 2023 that a new resettlement camp in Labondo, Adamawa State, was offering permanent housing for displaced families, she applied immediately.

By June of that year, she joined more than 2,000 Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) who had moved into a newly constructed settlement by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the UN refugee agency, in partnership with the Adamawa government.

But that relief Ms Daniel experienced was short-lived. Within months, hunger, diseases, and despair defined daily life in the resettlement camp.

The plight of the displaced

Ms Daniel’s struggle mirrors that of millions caught in the Boko Haram insurgency, which has devastated northeastern Nigeria, especially the states of Borno, Adamawa, and Yobe, for over a decade.

The insurgents’ relentless violence, which includes mass abduction of schoolgirls and widespread destruction of towns and villages, has displaced over two million people, causing one of the world’s most severe humanitarian crises and leaving many dependent on aid.

One effort made to address these critical challenges is the UNHCR’s Labondo Local Integration Pilot Project. To kick-start this initiative, which aims for durable and sustainable integration while promoting social cohesion and self-reliance among IDPs, UNHCR negotiated with the Adamawa government for 15 hectares of land.

This acquisition, funded by the Nigeria Humanitarian Fund (NHF) and the Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF), allowed for the construction of 454 permanent housing units with accompanying latrines, designed to accommodate 2,712 IDPs.

The project document, obtained by PREMIUM TIMES, outlines its core objectives: to enhance socio-economic security, improve essential infrastructure and basic services, and strengthen land tenure security and economic opportunities.

It also aims to complement government services for reconstruction, resilience, and recovery. Adopting a humanitarian-development-peace nexus approach, the initiative envisioned addressing the multifaceted challenges faced by IDPs in Adamawa State.

Speaking with PREMIUM TIMES, Suleiman Muhammad, the executive secretary of Adamawa State Emergency Management Agency (ADSEMA), said the resettlement means the resettled IDPs are no longer internally displaced.

“In a humanitarian context, when we say durable solutions, it means reintegration. When IDPs are reintegrated, they automatically gain independence and self-reliance,” he stated.

“They are no longer IDPs. They are considered indigenous and have equal rights with the indigenes.”

However, interviews with camp residents reveal a daily struggle for survival. Ms Daniel, for instance, said she faces constant dizziness, a symptom she attributed to severe hunger.

“We don’t have money to buy food, nor the money to get farmlands to grow crops,” she lamented.

A relentless fight for survival

By 2024, not only Ms Daniel but thousands of IDPs resettled in Labondo experienced severe food shortages. This drove some to consume Majanfara and Tasɓa, local green plants.

The women’s leader in the camp, Hadiza Hassan, said the food shortage led to at least six deaths in the camp.

With seven children, Mrs Hassan had enjoyed peace in her hometown of Gwoza, Borno State, until one Saturday in 2014, when insurgents invaded the town, killing several residents.

Her husband, who hid in a cave for days, survived, but the trauma left him with a chronic cough. The family fled to Madagali, then to Yola, the capital of Adamawa State, before returning to Gwoza, where they endured five more years of hardship.

“Life was difficult there,” she explained. “We can’t go to the outskirts of town. We can’t farm. If we go out, Boko Haram will kill us.” Her older son, she added, was attacked, leading to a bullet injury on his shoulder.

Unable to bear the hardship, they returned to Yola, where Mrs Hassan heard about the Labondo camp. She secured a spot and was happy to be on the list. While officials didn’t promise food, they offered some IDPs N120,000 as start-up capital for small businesses. Mrs Hassan used her money to buy a bag of maize and pay her children’s school fees.

However, within months, the maize was gone, resulting in a renewed hardship for the family.

Mrs Hassan said she was left with no choice but to send her husband back to Yola to search for a job, while she and her children worked on farms across the host community of Labondo, earning between N1,000 and N1,500 each day.

On days they earned nothing, they searched for local plants to eat.

With no access to food, Mrs Hassan told PREMIUM TIMES that some IDPs have resorted to selling essential parts of their homes, such as windows for N3,000 to N4,000 and doors for up to N10,000, to buy small food supplies that last only a few days.

The hunger in Labondo is part of a wider humanitarian collapse across northeast Nigeria.

According to the November 2024 Cadre Harmonisé (CH) report, an estimated 5.1 million people in Borno, Adamawa, and Yobe (BAY) states were expected to face food insecurity during the 2025 lean season, with approximately 450,000 expected to experience emergency levels of hunger.

No money, no medicine

Over-reliance on these plants and a lack of proper food led to a health crisis within the IDP camp. Mrs Hassan’s 12-year-old daughter became so malnourished that she couldn’t walk for three months, a condition doctors diagnosed as hunger-related.

Malnutrition is prevalent in northeastern Nigeria, with the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reporting in June 2025 that the number of children at risk of severe acute malnutrition (SAM) in Borno, Adamawa, and Yobe states is projected to double in 2025 to one million.

Over 600,000 of these children could face life-threatening conditions during the lean season between June and August if they don’t receive immediate nutrition services.

Mrs Hassan herself became so ill from chronic diarrhoea and abdominal pain that she could barely walk.
And despite a nearby Primary Healthcare Centre (PHC) in Labondo, Mrs Hassan couldn’t get treatment because care wasn’t free. With no money for medications, her condition worsened.

She narrated how her son went to the PHC, begging for basic Oral Rehydration Therapy (ORT), and was denied one. In a heartbreaking act, he trekked from Labondo to Jambutu, a distance of about 20 kilometres, to meet his father, who bought the ORT for Mrs Hassan.

“If you don’t have money, there is no treatment for you at the PHC,” she stated. “Health workers at the facility informed us that no medications were available for IDPs living in the camp, whether free or subsidised. So, we had to stop going there.”

With many IDPs complaining about the lack of free healthcare, Mr Muhammad, the Executive Secretary of ADSEMA, said the Adamawa government was taking steps to address the issue.

“The agency is collaborating with the Adamawa State Health Contributory Management Agency (ASCHIMA) to enrol them [resettled IDPs] into a health insurance programme under the state government,” he explained.

When PREMIUM TIMES visited the Labondo PHC, healthcare workers declined to comment, stating their officer in charge was unavailable.

However, unlike the resettled IDPs, Labondo residents confirmed receiving care at the PHC whenever they were sick and could pay for treatment. Some expressed the need for more staff at the facility.

Sadiq Ja’afar, the resettlement camp secretary, stated that the situation in Labondo made him prefer his previous life at the Malkohi IDP Camp in Yola South.

“Life was better there because we had access to healthcare,” he said. “If we fall sick, we can get free treatment. If it’s beyond the healthcare centre there, we will be referred to a hospital inside Yola town and even there, treatment would be free.”

‘We need more than just handouts’

In 2021, 50-year-old Hajara Tukur escaped Boko Haram insurgents who had abducted her and held her in the Sambisa Forest for several years.

After reuniting with her children in Madagali, her hometown, she fled once more. She settled at the Malkohi IDP Camp in Yola South, where she remained until her resettlement to Labondo in 2023.

Now, Ms Tukur shoulders the burden of caring for her five children and two grandchildren, whose mother, Ms Tukur’s daughter, remains in captivity.

During PREMIUM TIMES’ visit, she was lying down, weak and exhausted. She reported having no food to cook for the past three days, and was left to rely on small portions of food from her equally struggling neighbours.

Her grandchildren, present during the interview, were also crying.

“We need food. We need food,” she kept repeating. “We received charcoal recently. How useful will the charcoal be when one doesn’t have food to cook?”

Many IDPs in Labondo yearn for independence and plead for farmlands, seeds, and fertilisers to grow their own food. “It’s better for us to farm what we eat ourselves. We want to be self-reliant,” Mrs Hassan expressed.

Meanwhile, Mr Muhammad said ADSEMA had collaborated with the traditional leader in Labondo to provide the resettled IDPs with farmlands.

However, Idris Mahmud, the traditional leader of Labondo village, stated that the availability of farmlands in Labondo had decreased, forcing them to limit distribution.

“We give out only a few farmlands to a few people from the resettlement camp,” he said.

This scarcity is a major obstacle for the IDPs, who told PREMIUM TIMES they cannot access farmlands for free. Even renting a plot is beyond their reach, with prices ranging from N50,000 to N150,000.

Now, without this support, they walk to the host community’s rice fields in Labondo to scavenge leftover rice from the ground, then sift it from the dirt, dry it, and finally grind it to prepare porridge for their families.

Ms Daniel noted that this meal is rarely enough for proper feeding. “On days that we couldn’t get the rice leftovers, we would come back home and starve or, if available, give the children soaked garri without sugar to drink,” she said.

While the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) provided some households in the camp with gardening tools and seeds to grow nutritious vegetables within their house plots, Mrs Hassan said not every family benefited.

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The UNHCR also offered skills training in areas such as tailoring, soap making, and hand fan crafting to some of the resettled IDPs. However, this reporter was unable to independently verify specific beneficiaries or the training’s impact during his visit, as he only accessed a portion of the camp, not the entire facility.

The Labondo resettlement project was meant to be a turning point, a shift from temporary displacement to long-term stability. Instead, it has become a painful reminder that housing alone does not end displacement.

Without food, livelihoods, healthcare, land, or consistent support, the resettled IDPs say they feel abandoned.
“We are suffering quietly here, and no one truly understands what we are dealing with,” she said.
For now, families in Labondo continue to fight for survival, one day at a time.

This reporting was completed with the support of the Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development (CJID).