UN official: Lake Chad Basin poverty must be addressed

The international community must not view the problem of Boko Haram in the Lake Chad Basin as solely a military one but must remedy the underlying causes of extreme poverty that have allowed the extremist group to thrive there, a senior U.N. official said Tuesday.

Toby Lanzer, the U.N.’s regional humanitarian co-ordinator for the Sahel region, told reporters in an update that 4.4 million people in the area around Lake Chad that includes northern Nigeria and parts of Cameroon, Chad and Niger are severely “food insecure” or lack reliable access to enough affordable, nutritious food.

In a region that has suffered from both military conflict and environmental degradation, more government and private investment in development and infrastructure — not just humanitarian relief — are needed to prevent the likelihood of groups similar to Boko Haram from arising in the future.

“People have recognized that they need to scratch well below the surface and understand how this happened and why it happened,” Lanzer said. “A lot more needs to be done to tackle things such as the disenfranchised and marginalized communities” in the region.

Lanzer’s comments came a day after the Islamic State-allied group was suspected of staging two suicide bombings in Nigeria’s Maiduguri city in which the bombers but no one else were killed. Earlier this month, authorities said the group killed seven military police in an attack on a barracks in southeast Niger. The group’s 7-year uprising has left some 20,000 people dead.

Lanzer said the city of Maiduguri in the centre of Borno state normally has about 1 million residents but its population has swelled to 2.6 million because of the many people in the region displaced by the fighting.

The Sahel region is the zone of transition between the Sahara Desert to the north and the Sudanian Savanna and includes Burkina Faso, Chad, Cameroon, the Gambia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria and Senegal.