As they say in Africa, “When the elephants fight, the grass suffers.” Boko Haram’s terror and the Nigerian military’s heavy-handed response to it have led to massive displacement. Nigeria’s National Emergency Management Agency recently declared that at least 3 million civilians are in dire need of humanitarian assistance. The agency should work with the National Commission for Refugees to outline the scale of the problem without assigning blame.
The government should then formally ask the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and humanitarian organizations for assistance in addressing the problem. And the military should secure a humanitarian corridor to facilitate the safe travel of refugees and humanitarian aid. The fact that there are barely 610 miles of paved roads in Borno State, where Boko Haram has been most active, means that controlling and securing such a corridor in that territory is feasible.
To prevent corruption, the effort would need to be monitored by the National Human Rights Commission and the Transition Monitoring Group, which has experience fighting corruption and also deploying thousands of monitors for elections. It could set up a similar network to prevent diversions of aid.
