Around midnight on Sunday, Borno Governor, Professor Babagana Umara Zulum showed up at Mohammed Goni College of Islamic Legal Studies in Maiduguri, where internally displaced persons from Abadam local government area of Northern Borno were being camped.
Zulum immediately sealed the entrance and supervised a headcount to identify actual IDPs. This became necessary in order to put a stop to rampant cases of dubious residents pretending to be displaced. They spend the day at IDP camps to share food meant for IDPs, and go homes to sleep at night; with some even benefiting from other means through which the state distributes food to vulnerable non IDPs in communities.
Governor Zulum’s mission, which ended past 1am, discovered that out of 1,000 households in the records of humanitarian officials, 650 households were ghosts.
Four hundred and fifty (450) households were found to be real IDPs after Zulum’s midnight headcount which was conducted by the governor alongside an official of the National Emergency Management Agency, NEMA, Air Commodore M. T. Abdullahi, and two commissioners (Agriculture, and Local Government and Emirate Affairs).
In humanitarian system, a household normally consist of at least six persons who are either related through families, or chosen to stay together for the purpose of receiving household aids.
Officials who were part of the midnight headcount said Governor Zulum was not averse to approving support for any citizen who may be vulnerably in need of food since there is a committee doing that. However, the Governor is vehemently opposed to some residents making dubious claims in other to take what is meant for IDPs while also benefiting from other existing welfare activities that target non-IDPs.