The minister of health has revealed a shocking number of Nigerians affected by the rampaging Boko Haram insurgency that has killed about 17,000 people in the country since 2009.
Fifty million Nigerians are affected by insurgency, the Minister of Health, Prof. Isaac Adewole, said yesterday, the Nation reports.
He noted that the proportion of the citizens directly or indirectly affected were all over the country and not just the over two million Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) in the Northeast.
Adewole added that more people were affected from fears generated by Boko Haram. The minister spoke yesterday in Abuja at a special meeting on humanitarian programmes in the Northeast organised by the United Nations Funds for Population Activities (UNFPA) in collaboration with his ministry.
He described his ministry’s new slogan as “every life and death counts in the country”. The minister said he had met with the country’s chief medical directors and asked them to report to him monthly on the number of deaths that occurred.
He said: “If we fail to address the challenges of the Northeast, the consequence on the entire nation will be drastic.
“We are only looking at the tip of the iceberg by talking of two million internally displaced, of which 1.9 million are found in Adamawa, Borno, Gombe and Adamawa. But the proportions of Nigerians affected could be 50 million directly and indirectly because, even the people in Lagos and Ogun are also affected by it.
“There are fears and things are no longer the same; let us face the challenges to prevent it from snowballing”