The National Emergency Agency, NEMA, said at least 30 persons had died in the flood while 414,000 were displaced as 70 per cent of the city was submerged in flood water.

Speaking from Maiduguri where humanitarian workers are on the front line to provide immediate support to affected residents, Plan International Nigeria’s Food Security and Nutrition Specialist, Dr Emmanuel Nuhu, called on all stakeholders including the government, politicians, donor agencies, and INGOs to prioritise coordinated support for the residents.

“This is the worst flood in the state in over three decades and the washing away of debris from cemeteries, zoos, waste disposal sites, sewages, and other filthy locations put the residents especially children and girls in danger of contracting waterborne diseases such as cholera, giardiasis, salmonellosis and dysentery,” he said.

READ ALSO: Cholera: Four die, 36 in hospitals in Adamawa

He said: “The situation is dire for a population that has suffered displacement and hardship due to insurgency for more than 14 years.”

Also speaking, the Country Director of Plan International Nigeria, Charles Usie while commiserating with the governor and people of Borno State, said in a crisis like this, “children and women suffer most. Food is scarce and basic hygiene materials for adolescent girls and women are unavailable.”

He commended the state governor for showing leadership by personally leading relief support for the affected residents.

“Maiduguri is host to our biggest humanitarian intervention in the northeast of Nigeria. We are working round the clock to support victims many of who have lost their homes and are displaced,” Usie said.

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The Non-Governmental Organisation cited the recent Multidimensional Poverty Index, MPI, report issued by the National Bureau of Statistics which put the number of Nigerians living in poverty at 133 million out of a population of over 200 million.

Expressing worries about what he termed “distractive and unnecessary debate between the federal government and some of the state governors.”

The Country Director of Plan International Nigeria, Charles Usie, said that “the state of poverty as shown by the MPI is alarming and requires serious attention by the government at all levels.”

The report painted a grim picture of not only poverty but its impact on children, their health, education and nutrition.

Majority of the poor in Nigeria, it showed are children, as 67.5% of children under the age of 18 are poor and 70.1% of children under 5 are poor.

Usie expressed worries that children’s education was one of the most impacted by poverty with 57.8 million children of school-going age (6 to 15 years old) and 29% of all school-aged children not attending school.

The report indicated that 94% of all of these out-of-school children are poor, as Usie noticed “their situation of being out of school is tightly linked to multidimensional poverty.”

That, he said, was worrisome and not acceptable.

“What this translates to, is that 27% of all school-aged children are both poor and out of school,” he said.

Usie said that the listing of such variables such as food security, nutrition, child deprivation, school lag, water reliability, underemployment and security shocks provides like never before a clearer picture of the incidence and intensity of poverty in the country and makes available data that shows the dimensions of poverty at all relevant sectors and levels.

He however expressed worry that the government at the federal and state levels since the release of the report had not come out with an appropriate response to the issues contained in the report.

“What has been in the news from both the federal government and the states are recriminations on whom to hold responsible for the state of multidimensional poverty in the country. Rather than the distractive squabbles over who to blame, both federal and state governments should devote time and energy to addressing matters arising from the report and give assurance to Nigerians that there are some serious and well thought out responses to the issues,” Usie said.

He said further that “the country was rich enough in human capital and natural resources to walk back the suffering of the people especially children and girls through prudent and efficient management of the resources.”

The country director also called for clear disaggregation of the sex or gender of the survey respondents in subsequent reports to give a deeper meaning and understanding of the dimension of poverty to enable adequately tailored intervention by relevant stakeholders.

He called for particular intervention to be focused on rural communities where much of the reported poverty resides.

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This is in view of the problems the increasing population is posing to the efforts to solve the poor economic problem of the country.

The Minister of Finance, Zainab Ahmed, made this known on Tuesday at the 24th Nigerian Economic Summit in Abuja.

She said it had been discovered that to make a success of the Economic Recovery and Growth Plan, ERGP, there would be need to work on the increasing rate of the nation’s population.

Her words:  “We have been engaging traditional rulers and other leaders.

“Specifically, we have found out that to be able to address one of the great challenges that we identified in the ERGP, which is the growth in our population, we need to engage these institutions.

“And we hope that with their support, we will get to a point where we can come out with the policy that limits the number of children that a mother can have because that is important for sustaining our growth.”

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