From: Sylvanus Viashima, Jalingo
About 10,433 Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), in Taraba State, have benefited from food items delivered to them by officials of the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA).
Speaking at the IDPs camp in Mutum Biyu in Gassol Local Government Area of the state, the leader of NEMA team, Deputy Director Sanusi Ado, said the programme was in continuation of the distribution flagged-off by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, in Maiduguri, some months back.
Ado said that the emphasis was to make sure that middlemen were taken out from the distribution channel of relief materials to IDPs, so as to avoid where materials meant for IDPs werediverted for other purposes.
He said that the agency was giving of 50kg of food items comprising of maize, soybeans, and sorghum to each affected household across nine local government areas in the state.
Ado also said that the agency was committed to ensuring that the IDPs have some of the basic needs especially things needed to take care of their nutritional requirements. He also assured that all the 10,433 identified IDPs in the state would get their rations delivered to them directly by NEMA officials.
The leader of the camp, Alhaji Umar Shuaibu, said that the gesture was a huge relief to the beneficiaries as food has become a major challenge for most of the IDPs in the camp.
Shuaibu said that the IDPs were still in dire need of medical supplies as some of the sick could not afford medical bills.
He urged the state government to expedite actions for the safe return of the displaced people to their homes as the life on the camps “affects not only the quality of our lives but also our self esteem and the future of our children”.
Shuaibu appealed to other groups and persons to reach out to the IDPs especially in terms of providing education for the children on the camp who have almost lost hope of going to school again.
One of the beneficiaries, an eighty-year-old Hajia Hauwa Ibrahim told Saturday Sun that since she had been at the camp for the past three years, this was the first time she had received such quantity of relief materials.
Hauwa appreciated the officials for taking out time to get to each of them in their houses and pleaded with the government to make arrangement for them to return to their homes, or what is left of it so that they could continue with their lives.
Most of the over 3000 IDPs on the camp were displaced from Wukari during the communal clashes that almost left the whole town in ruins in 2013, and have remained without a means of livelihood since.