The United Nations has said that thousands of Nigerians who escaped attacks by Boko Haram are stuck on some of the countless little islands that dot Lake Chad and are in dire need of food, water, shelter and medical care.

The UN also said it is “planning for the arrival (in Chad) of as many as 30,000 Nigerian refugees over the coming months” amid uncertain hope that the crisis would not worsen.

“Unless these refugees can be located and moved to an established refugee camp at Baga-Sola, 70 kilometres from the Nigerian border, they are going to remain extremely vulnerable where they are,” head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Chad, Alice Armanni Sequi, was quoted in a report by UN’s news agency, Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN).

“Many of the islands are little more than swampy marshes or sandbars. While some are inhabited, their residents have little to offer the refugees except their homes: Chad’s Lake Region is one of the poorest parts of one of the poorest and least developed countries in the world. In some communities, the recent influx has more than doubled the population,” the report said.

“The current situation is quite complex. Many of the refugees have settled in places where we cannot provide them with any support, even though we desperately want to,” the deputy representative for the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) in Chad, Mamadou Dian Balde, said, explaining that some of the islands are at least a day’s motorboat ride from the shore.

A growing crisis

More than 17,000 Nigerians have taken refuge in Chad since May 2013, according to UNHCR. An additional 100,000 have fled to Niger and 37,000 to Cameroon.

The biggest influx into Chad - more than 14,000, at a rate of up to 1,000 a day - followed Boko Haram’s January 3 attack on the north-eastern Nigerian town of Baga. Hundreds of people were killed and entire villages burned.  More than one in five of the new arrivals lack any form of shelter, according to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

 “Most refugees in the past year or two went to Niger, which is closer and easier to access (overland), or even Cameroon. The fact that they started to come in large numbers [across the lake] into Chad was an act of desperation,” Balde said.

Relocation

The camp at Baga-Sola, known as Dar-es-Salam (“place of peace”) can house 15,000 refugees and is currently hosting just over 3,000. UNHCR is working with the Chadian government to transport an additional 2,000 refugees on the islands to the camp.

The Ministry of Public Health has posted doctors and nurses in Dar-es-Salam and added extra health workers to communities hosting large numbers of refugees. Disease and outbreaks, such as malaria and cholera, remain of concern, however. And in this part of Chad, maternal healthcare is next to non-existent.

Identifying returnees

Local authorities say they know of at least 1,100 Chadians who had been living and working in Nigeria and who fled back home when the violence erupted. Aid agencies say the actual number is probably much higher.

The return of these breadwinners has cut off a financial lifeline for many families.

“Although they have returned to their families of origin, they carry many of the same vulnerabilities as the Nigerian refugees. And as they live in their households of origin, among host communities, they are harder to identify. This puts them at a greater risk of remaining in the shadow of aid, which has until now been largely concentrated in refugee camps,” Sequi said.

Struggling host communities

In the Lake Region, almost a third of the population does not have regular access to enough food to live a healthy life, according to the UN’s World Food Programme. Malnutrition rates among children under five exceed the emergency threshold of 15 per cent.

The economic situation has been made worse by the closure of Chad’s land border with Nigeria in August, which halted the movement of local traders, herders and merchants, and has led to food shortages and rising food prices.

The host communities “must not be forgotten by the aid community. They shared all they had (with the refugees), depleting their own food stocks and economic assets...So increasing our assistance to host and local communities remains critical,” Sequi said.

According to OCHA, some $31 million is needed to meet humanitarian needs in the Lake Region, including those of the refugees. How much of this will come through is uncertain: last year’s Chad appeal was just 36 per cent funded.

“Chad is historically an underfunded crisis. The humanitarian community in Chad is constantly faced with the challenge of finding the financial inputs to do our work, and it’s no less for this operation,” Sequi said.

WFP, which has supplied more than 6,000 refugees with emergency food rations, and has begun distributing one-month rations to people in the camp, says that it will need nearly $11 million to meet the needs of everyone.

“The refugees that we received last year, we were able to react to quite quickly, and provide them with food aid distributions. Today, our biggest challenge is that the situation itself is almost completely unfunded,” the deputy country director for WFP in Chad, Peter Musoko, said.

OCHA says it is now reaching out to the Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) to support aid operations in response to the Nigeria crisis.

For the moment, many agencies have been fronting their internal cash to ensure the immediate response, Sequi said, but added that this is not sustainable, nor will it allow for any scale-up.

The UN says it is planning for the arrival of many as 30,000 Nigerian refugees over the coming months, depending on the security situation.

“It’s one of those situations where the challenge is greater than the resources available. Humanitarian actors are doing all they can but…getting more funding for our response in the region will be critical to our ultimate success,” Sequi said.

Concerns mount as political tension threaten naira

The naira has crashed through the key level of 200 to the dollar this week in a rout sparked by weak oil prices and escalating tension over the postponement of a presidential election in Africa’s biggest economy, Reuters news agency has reported.

Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Governor, Godwin Emefiele, had said on Thursday that the naira was “appropriately priced” despite a nearly 25 per cent slump against the dollar in the last three months, asking investors to stay calm.

“We are not in the best of times but there’s no need to panic,” he told CNBC Africa in an interview. He ruled out an emergency Monetary Policy Committee meeting, and said floating the currency was not an option.

In the latest update on its reserves, Reuters noted, the CBN said its stockpile of dollars had dropped to $33.4 billion as of February 10, a decline of $1 billion in nine trading sessions since January 28.

Dealers noted further intervention during chaotic trading on Wednesday and Thursday. On both days, leading banks triggered an agreed ‘circuit-breaker’ to halt electronic trading because of the pace of the naira’s fall.

The latest reserves data marked a dramatic escalation in efforts to stabilise the naira from the CBN, which last year forked out an average $20 million a day to prop up the currency.

The naira ended Thursday at a new record closing low of 205.60 to the dollar, compared with the central bank’s target range of 160-176.

‘Something’s got to give’

Naira derivatives betting on the future level of the currency now point to it collapsing to around 280 to the dollar in a year.

The failure to stem the rout by tightening domestic liquidity or pumping dollars into the foreign exchange market piles even more pressure on Emefiele to devalue the currency for the second time in three months.

Most analysts had assumed this would happen soon after a February 14 election, seen as a close race between President Goodluck Jonathan and ascetic former military ruler Muhammadu Buhari.

But that vote was postponed last week until March 28, ostensibly on security concerns, leaving Emefiele the unenviable choice of ploughing through billions more dollars of reserves in the next six weeks or taking huge political heat.

“You wonder how they’re going to survive if you look at the pace reserves are falling. I don’t entirely rule out something happening before March 28. Something’s got to give,” Renaissance Capital analyst, Yvonne Mhango, said in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Bond auction falls short

Nigeria relies on oil for 90 per cent of its foreign exchange, and the currency started to come under pressure in early November when the impact of the collapse in world crude prices started to be felt.

In another worrying sign for Abuja, which is facing a funding crunch due to the decline in oil revenues, a domestic bond auction fell short of expectations on Thursday, raising only N76 billion out of an intended 90 billion.

The stock market has also come in for a pummelling, with the blue-chip Nigeria Stock Exchange (NSE) 30 Index dropping 2.7 per cent on Thursday to its lowest in more than two years.

Weighing on both equities and the currency in the longer-term is the fear of prolonged political stalemate or constitutional crisis in Africa’s most populous nation, whose economy has habitually suffered around election time.

This weekend’s vote was delayed after security forces said they could not guarantee the safety of voters. That has led to speculation that the military, which has largely stayed out of politics for 15 years, might be slipping back into old habits.

On Wednesday, the army denied any involvement in politics or taking sides between Jonathan and Buhari.