Reps committee queries national commission for refugees over resettlement of Bakassi people

The House of Representatives Committee on Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) on Monday queried the National Commission for Refugees, Migrants and Internally Displaced Persons over the recurring issue of the resettlement of the displaced people of Bakassi of which N200 million was appropriated for in 2022 and urged something be done about it permanently.

The committee headed by Mohammed Jega, queried the National Commissioner of the commission, Imaan Sulaiman-Ibrahim, during the 2022 budget and expressed deep concern over the increasing numbers of IDPs in the country.

This came just as the national commissioner said that the number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the country grew by one million in the past year.

According to a member of the committee, Hon Awaji Abiante, “I don’t know how long we would be resettling Bakassi IDPs. I don’t know for how long. That has been around for over 10 years. We keep resettling them. We resettle until we resettle the fourth generation. Do we have statistics?

“As as today how many have been resettled in terms of figures and percentage. So we know what is left. Let it not look as if we are pouring water into a basket. It would be unending. Every year resettlement Bakassi. How many people have been resettled? What is the percentage of the outstanding IDPs that need to be resettled?” a member of the committee asked.

The commission was also queried over N25 million paid as rent annually for its office in Abuja and urged that it should make effort to acquire one of the properties seized by the Federal Government. The lawmakers queried the commission over the lack of proper data about IDPs and other persons of concern.

They also questioned the resettlement city project for IDPs and other refugees which N1 billion was allocated for in 2021, had N600m was released for it, yet it reoccurred in the 2022 budget with a sum of N2.5 billion.

However, the commissioner in her response admitted that data was very scarce in their area of work, but they were working on ensuring that they have accurate data that would be properly referenced.

She said last year, work had started on the resettlement city and they were proposing an additional N2.5 billion and added that there was a need to intensify in the project as it was going at a very slow pace and that it could hardly accommodate even one percent of the persons of concerns.

Suleman said that the country now has three million IDPs which she said was due to the current unprecedented humanitarian crisis in Nigerian and the alarming growth rate of displacement.

The commissioner also said over 500,000 Nigerians were awaiting repatriation from Chad, Cameroon, Niger, Cameroon, Libya and other countries and that the country had hosted about 73,000 refugees from 23 countries.

She explained that the proposed aggregate expenditure for 2022 was N5,740,063,922 comprised of N1,182,728,095 as recurrent cost and N4,457,335,827 as the capital component.

She said this was due to the increase in the number of persons of concern across the six geopolitical zones and the need for the commission’s presence nationwide and called for an increase in their overhead to adequately deliver on the mandate of the commission.

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