Four months after the closure of the Internally Displaced Persons’ camps in Maiduguri, about 12,000 resettled persons have reportedly returned to the camps in Monguno town, Monguno LGA in Northern Borno along the fringes of Lake Chad.
Borno State Government had sent out the IDPs back to their rebuilt communities but, according to an international NGO Intersos, the IDPs have returned to some camps managed by the government in Monguno because their communities are still inaccessible due to the nefarious activities of insurgents.
Personnel of Intersos, an international NGO operating in Borno state, made this disclosure on Wednesday in Abuja during a training workshop for working journalists drawn from the North-Eastern states of Borno, Adamawa and Yobe.
“12,486 individuals constituting about three thousand households who were sent out of the IDP camps in Maiduguri returned to the IDP camps in Monguno.
This is besides the other IDPs we already have in the camps we manage in Monguno. We manage six IDP camps and we have ninety-six thousand IDPs already before these twelve thousand persons came,” said an Intersos official, Ibrahim Iliyasu.
He also said the other camps were being managed by the International Organisation of Migration, having received a large number of migrants – the exact figure of which the official said he was oblivious of.
He further said, “In the three states we operate in the North-East, that is Borno, Adamawa and Yobe states, there are over two million IDPs representing 40% of the population residing in the IDP camps, and this has led to increased human rights violations and abuses in these camps”.
