Malnutrition in Northeast

The alarm by the World Food Programme (WFP) that about two million children in the North-Eastern part of Nigeria are projected to suffer from acute malnutrition, and that cases of acute severe malnutrition have quadrupled to 700,000 gives cause for concern and must be heeded by the relevant authorities.

The problem of malnutrition in the Northeast is so bad that we now read of cases of women who abandoned their infants to die rather than watch them die of hunger. Child marriages are a causative factor in this plague of malnutrition. No child-mother can be in a position economically to feed her child nutritious food. They lack the means and cannot even identify nutritious foods, which are critical to the child’s well-being. How can a child take care of another child successfully? Another causative factor is the failure of the various state governments in the region to educate the masses on the importance of family planning. Most poor northerners have more than one wife and experience difficulty catering to their children. Malnutrition is a challenge requiring short, medium, and long-term solutions. Governments in the Northeast should collaborate with NGOs and other global agencies to find solutions to malnutrition in the region. They should stop behaving like the proverbial ostrich that buries its head in the sand, hoping that the problem of malnutrition will suddenly vanish without any effort on their part.

• Peter Ovie Akus, New Jersey, USA.

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