The only thing visibly moving on Mohammed’s tiny and enfeebled frame is his rapidly beating heart. The boy, aged two years and four months, weighs just 12 pounds and is one of the smallest victims of Boko Haram’s violence in Nigeria’s northeast.
His mother, Hafsa, can only look on helplessly as she sits on the hospital bed with her son, cradling a healthy and plump infant daughter.
Concerned about Mohammed’s constant diarrhoea and drastic weight loss, she risked a trip through the heartland of the Muslim extremist group to the provincial capital Maiduguri. Arriving at a clinic that treats hundreds of children a day for conditions including severe and acute malnutrition, Mohammed was transferred to a hospital that will save his life. Some don’t get that chance.
Child malnutrition is not new to Nigeria. It is often caused by a lack of education for mothers as much as lack of adequate food for children under five. “Sometimes the issue is as simple as a mother transferring all her attention to a newborn and neglecting an older child,” said Emmanuel Nwaiqu, a Nigerian doctor who works in the Médecins Sans Frontières-funded hospital in Maiduguri where dozens of children like Mohammed are being cared for.
Yet the six-year insurgency has only exacerbated a fragile situation, uprooting 2.5 million people from their homes across the region and destroying their ability to feed and care for their children properly.
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Mohammed is just one of the 225,000 children whom the UN estimates are suffering from severe and acute malnutrition in the Lake Chad basin, the area worst affected by Boko Haram’s campaign of terror.
Mohammed’s father was forced to abandon his job as a fisherman because the violence had closed the market as people fled for safety. The family of 14 now lives off the 50 pence a day rent they receive from a small dwelling.
It is hoped that a Unicef programme, partly paid for by Britain, that provides a nutrient-rich peanut snack for children can avert a rise this year in cases of severe and acute malnutrition in Nigeria’s northeast, yet funding for it remains critically low.
Toby Lanzer, the UN regional humanitarian co-ordinator for the Sahel region, said it was children that were paying the heaviest price. “We have 225,000 kids who are severely acutely malnourished. Why is this? Because their mums and dads can’t work the fields, can’t tend to the cattle and can’t provide for their children. It’s really an untold story.
“Perhaps the world is becoming numb to numbers.”