Nigeria Has 3rd Highest IDPs After Syria, Iraq – NHRC.

The chairman of the National Human Rights Commission, Prof Chidi Odinkalu, has disclosed that with about one million people displaced from their homes, Nigeria harbours the third highest number of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in the world, behind war-torn Syria and Iraq.

He stated this yesterday at a national conference organised by the United Nations Millennium Campaign (UNMC), the MDGs Office and the Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA) with the theme, ‘Good Governance Beyond 2015: Setting Agenda for Inclusive and Sustainable Development in an Era of Change.’

According to the human rights chief, because of the fragility of the state and its institutions, violence has become a major cause of mortality in Nigeria.

Odinkalu quoted the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) Global Overview of 2014 which said that “Boko Haram’s ruthless campaign to establish an independent Islamic state in North-eastern Nigeria also drove new significant displacements.

“It was responsible for displacing more than three-quarters of at least 975,300 people in the country during the year, while many others fled inter-communal violence in the Middle Belt region.”

The IDMC report stated that as at the end of 2014, 38 million people around the world had been forced to flee their homes by armed conflicts and generalised violence, and were living in displacement within the borders of their own country while 11 million people were newly displaced during the year, the equivalent of 30,000 fleeing each day.

“Never in the last 10 years of IDMC’s global reporting, from the peak of the Darfur crisis in 2004 have we reported such a high estimate for the number of people newly displaced in a year. Today, there are almost twice as many IDPs as there are refugees worldwide,” the report said.

Odinkalu noted that the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and indeed the wider project of development are themselves founded on the notions of human rights, human dignity and equality generally.

Earlier, the executive director of OSIWA, Abdul Tejan-Cole, said that as the MDGs are winding down by September this year, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) would be signed by all the nations of the world at a meeting in New York on a new development agenda.

He said, “Nigeria has made very impressive progress with the MDGs but the story of the MDGs is an unfinished business because we still have issues like HIV, illiteracy, hunger, sanitation and more. We are going to transit these development issues to the next agenda.”

“All the stakeholders are here and we shall be talking and strategising on how we can lay the structural, institutional and legal framework for the early implementation of the SDGs.”

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