The News
Millions of Nigerians are going hungry as recent floods have compounded the toll of ongoing security and economic crises.
Those in northern Nigeria — many of whom have been displaced by attacks from the Islamist militia Boko Haram — are facing the gravest hardships: According to a UN estimate, torrential rains have destroyed over 3.7 million acres of cropland, affecting more than nine million people’s food supply.
The floods, made more extreme by climate change, come amid the country’s worst economic crisis in a generation. “I can’t even cry anymore. I’m too tired,” one displaced woman told Reuters.
SIGNALS
The Nigerian economy is at a ‘turning point’
The largest economy in sub-Saharan Africa is at a “turning point” after the implementation of politically challenging reforms last year, a World Bank economist argued in the Financial Times. The government’s measures to cut petrol subsidies, for instance, will restore the naira as a “credible currency,” wrote Indermit Gill. However, Nigeria’s success hinges on the government’s ability to produce a cost-effective safety net to protect vulnerable families from inflation, which is still exorbitantly high. Otherwise, civil unrest and pressure from elites could force the government to back-peddle.
Violent extremism in the Lake Chad Basin and beyond
Climate change is increasingly threatening human security and state stability within developing nations. Considered a “threat multiplier,” climate change-induced drought and extreme weather events in the Lake Chad Basin — which includes northeastern Nigeria — have damaged crops, ruined livelihoods, displaced millions, and made many young people vulnerable to recruitment by extremist groups such as Boko Haram, the Wilson Center wrote. Though the connection between climate change and conflict has received more attention in recent years — in 2015 the US acknowledged the “urgent and growing threat” of climate change on the country’s national security — the relationship is “indirect” and “complex,” the Council on Foreign Relations wrote, and the work of “environmental peace-building” has been “limited so far.”