Nigeria’s missing children: ‘Nobody is trying to find my parents’

The bandits came during rainy season. It was around 2pm when residents of Gangara village heard the sound of guns and fled. “The people scattered and started running in all directions,” recalls Farida. She was at home with her parents and four siblings. That was the last time she saw them.

The now 14-year-old has spent the last three years in a refugee camp in Niger. She sits on a mat, her head bowed, wearing a light blue hijab with silver balls decorating the top, mauve leggings and a wrap-around yellow and red skirt. Her name has been changed, as requested by humanitarian organisation Save the Children: a condition of the interview, due to concerns about her family’s safety.

Farida lives with Baraka Dandgima, a woman in her 40s whom she vaguely knew from growing up in her village. The two neighbours found each other in the aftermath of the attack, and ended up walking hundreds of kilometres to Niger, they say, before they were transferred into this camp, in Chadakori. Dandgima herself is missing six children. Only the youngest, a five-year-old girl, is still with her.

“Nobody is trying to find my parents,” says Farida – a frustration that is echoed by Dandgima about her children, and likely by thousands of other Nigerians too. As counting of votes continues this week in the presidential election in Africa’s most populous country, it is one aspect of Nigeria’s various security crises that those affected want the new leadership to address.

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In northern Nigeria, when danger strikes, people scatter. In the chaos of an attack – which may include threats, bullets, sexual violence and the slaughter of civilians – everyone runs for their lives. Who they end up spending the following years with may be determined by chance: who happened to be there at the time? Whom did they collide with as they fled?

Communications networks can be poor in northern Nigeria, or even shut down on purpose by insurgent groups or the government – another casualty in the ongoing conflicts. In 2021, for example, a near three-month telecommunications blackout was imposed by state authorities in Zamfara state. Those who flee may run without phones anyway, losing a means of contacting their family members again. A painful uncertainty follows: where are their loved ones? Are they even alive?

The main organisation working to reunite separated family members in Nigeria is the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). It has registered more than 25,000 missing people in the country – its largest caseload across Africa. “It likely only represents a fraction of the total number,” said Tatjana Halpaap, the ICRC’s team lead for what they call the “protection of family links”. She was speaking on the phone from Maiduguri, in the capital of Nigeria’s northern Borno state.

The ICRC had a staff of about 35 – including 10 in Maiduguri – working on registering missing people and family tracing, she said. Assisting them are 426 volunteers who operate in tandem with community leaders. They are mostly focused on the crisis in Nigeria’s northeast, where an Islamist insurgency has been raging since 2009, displacing at least 2.5 million people and resulting in an unknown number of fatalities. Estimates of the death toll there range from tens of thousands to nearly 350,000 when indirect causes are included, according to a UN report released in 2021.

[ Modernity is slow to come to Niger, one of the poorest countries in the world ]

Alongside this are missing people: some abducted; others separated from their families and now living in territory held by armed groups, camps for displaced people or even neighbouring countries. Disappearances registered with the ICRC peaked between 2015 and 2017, Halpaap said. More than half of those listed as missing were children at the time.

The organisation has been operating in Nigeria since the 1960s, originally running a similar family tracing programme during the Biafran war.

“Looking for a missing person is like looking for a needle in a haystack,” Halpaap said. “Sometimes you get frustrated.” Since 2018, 91 physical reunifications have taken place that the ICRC has been involved in. These were all between adults and children, while adults reunited with each other are connected through phone calls and messages.

They use all their money to look for these people because they still have hope that they’re somewhere … It’s very difficult to move forward and rebuild their lives

—  Tatjana Halpaap, International Committee of the Red Cross

“There have been, in the last 13 years, many attacks on cities and villages and many people get killed. People run, there are abductions by armed groups, and for some of them we just don’t know what happened to them,” Halpaap said. “The families themselves do a lot to try to look for their family members, but most of the time they cannot go back to the places where they come from, where the person disappeared, because of security. The roads are dangerous, it’s difficult to travel.”

In parts of northern Nigeria, she said, “there are many [areas] that are not covered by phone networks. Internet, forget about it. So of course it makes it very difficult if they cannot use technology”.

People who open “tracing requests” with the ICRC provide the missing person’s name, their mother’s name, a physical description and the location where they were last seen.

Using the information gathered, the ICRC creates booklets of photographs to help with the search for the missing, and has names of the missing called out in camps for displaced people. For a year, the organisation supported a radio programme on the Hausa-language service of Radio France Internationale called We’ll See Each Other Again One Day. It ended because of the high cost, but another similar programme will be launched on a local Hausa radio station in March. Halpaap said they hoped to have certain broadcasts dedicated to missing people in certain areas, and will advertise which area they are focusing on in advance so anyone from there can tune in.

In the last few weeks, there have been two ICRC-organised reunifications, she said: they were “surreal” but wonderful. One involved a 15-year-old who was separated from his family seven years ago, when insurgents attacked his village and abducted him; the other involved a 16-year-old who split from his family 10 years ago. That teenager’s grandmother said the reunion was “sweeter than honey”, Halpaap recalled, and his father said that day brought more joy to him and his wife than the day the boy was born. “They were hoping every day and praying that he would come back,” Halpaap said. But the couple still had two other missing children, “so it never ends”.

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While the insurgency in Nigeria’s northeast has lasted much longer, the northwest – where Farida and Dandgima come from – is now being terrorised by bandits: groups of armed criminals who murder, kidnap and pillage at will. The government’s failure to stop the violence means that more than one million people have been displaced, with many forced to flee beyond Nigeria’s borders. There are more than 200,000 Nigerian refugees in Niger, with nearly 8,000 of them in the camp Farida lives in – all from Nigeria’s northwest. Many hope they will be reunited with missing relatives, but have no idea how to find them.

Halpaap said the ICRC was not doing as much work in the northwest currently as it was “already quite overwhelmed in the northeast”.

If people come to the organisationto open a tracing request, she said, “we actually want to do something and we need the capacity to do so. And if we start spreading and spreading and spreading without having the resources, it means that we would keep giving people hope without actually being accountable and without actually doing the job. So I would be very careful with that, but in the end what the people face is the same, and it’s horrible. And I just wish that the situation will get better, honestly.

[ Nigerian refugees reduced to onlookers as election approaches ]

“What families of the missing are facing every day, it doesn’t matter if it’s linked to the conflict in the northeast or the northwest,” continued Halpaap. “They have no closure, they cannot sleep at night, many have a lot of health issues. And then the economic impact is also extremely high … they use all their money to look for these people because they still have hope that they’re somewhere … It’s very difficult to move forward and rebuild their lives.”

Some progress has been made in Nigeria towards creating a national mechanism focused on missing people. In January, a meeting on this was held in the capital Abuja, attended by representatives of the government and civil society, as well as families of the missing. “The meeting was organised to raise awareness on the disappearances in Nigeria and to establish a collaborative network, trying to find solutions… discuss priorities,” said Halpaap. “It’s in process … Now we really see that there’s a willingness coming from the government. We’ll do what we can do to support [it], hoping that it will keep going in the right direction.”

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Sitting on a mat in her shelter in the camp in Niger, Dandgima looks wistful as she describes life in her and Farida’s former home of Gangara, in Nigeria’s Sokoto state, before the banditry started. It was “a big peaceful village and people were busy”, she recalls. There were a few rich people with nice houses, and most people were farmers, growing millet and rice, while also gardening and trading.

Sometimes the phone network in Nigeria is not good. There was a time because of security that the network was shut down in the area to stop the bandits from communicating

—  Baraka Dandgima

“People did small businesses and we celebrated a lot of ceremonies: naming ceremonies, feasts. There was a big market held every Tuesday, and the people in the surroundings would gather to exchange things and sell their goods. All the surrounding people would come and buy all their needs for the whole week.”

[ Kidnapping becomes endemic in Nigeria’s northwest ]

The bandits shot and murdered many residents, including Dandgima’s husband. After the attack, they camped out near the village, Dandgima says, making residents too frightened to return there. Escapees took little but the clothes they were wearing – many left without photographs of their families, documents proving their own identities and other remnants of the life they had before.

Dandgima tries to stay in touch with neighbours from Gangara, but speaking by phone is a challenge. “Sometimes the phone network in Nigeria is not good. There was a time because of security that the network was shut down in the area to stop the bandits from communicating,” she explains.

She regularly makes inquiries about her children and Farida’s parents. The only breakthrough came when she was passed on a number said to be for one of her sons, but when she calls it no one picks up.

Around them in Niger, life goes on. A grandmother holds a baby born two days before to two Nigerians who married in the camp. A small child sings while playing with a shoe tied to a piece of rope.

Farida is attending school; she says she likes all her classes and has friends there. “I will wait and see how things go,” she says, when asked about her future.

Dandgima is happy to mind her, though she says more cash assistance and food would be helpful, and she is already worried about Farida’s future. “In a few years she will get married and I don’t have anything to provide for it.”

For now, they are living “peacefully”.

“I treat her like my own daughter,” Dandgima says. “If she does something wrong I try to correct her to educate her.” But she also knows that they are united in sorrow. “Sometimes I realise she’s sad and I don’t know what to do to make her happy.”