1.5 Million Facing Starvation : Nigeria Bars Famine Aid to Chad From Main Port

More than 1.5 million hungry people in landlocked Chad face a grim future because ships loaded with emergency food aid have been prevented from unloading at Nigeria’s main port, U.N. World Food Program officials said here Tuesday.

“We are running out of time,” warned Jamie Wickens, the agency’s representative for Chad, who said that 1.5 million to 2 million people in the sub-Saharan African nation of just over 5 million are threatened with starvation.

Nigeria has been the main conduit for international food aid to Chad and neighboring Niger, another drought country, because its port of Apapa, near Lagos, is geared for quick unloading of ships, and land transportation routes from Lagos to the stricken countries are well-established.

But since March 6, when a ship chartered by the U.N. agency carrying 7,000 tons of wheat from West Germany was refused permission by Nigerian authorities to unload, none of its emergency aid vessels have been allowed to use the port, said Erik L. Moller, head of the World Food Program’s Africa task force secretariat in Rome.

Moller said Nigeria has given no reason for the refusal other than to suggest that it needs Apapa’s facilities for its own imports. Although Nigeria closed its land borders in an anti-smuggling move a year ago, it has previously permitted emergency food aid to Chad and Niger to routinely pass through without delay.

Moller said three other chartered ships bearing American, Canadian and Italian famine aid have had to be diverted to smaller West African ports, where unloading and transport facilities are questionable.

“It is vitally important that we reach Chad with this food before the rainy season makes roads impassable, and there is no way we can meet the need without making use of the Apapa port,” he added.

The ship bearing the first stalled shipment, the Daphne, is still waiting off Apapa after 27 days, he said, at a daily charge of $3,250 that he said the agency cannot afford.

Another ship bearing 2,450 tons of Italian rice waited 17 days, unloading only 120 tons before being refused further use of the port, according to Moller. It was diverted to Douala, in neighboring Cameroon, from which he said transport to Chad will be difficult.

A third cargo ship, with 7,600 tons of Canadian wheat, was diverted to Cotonou, Benin, west of Nigeria, he said. However, there are no facilities there either to bag the grain or to transport it to Chad so the entire shipment will instead go to Niger, which is easier to reach.

The fourth ship, filled with American sorghum, is due to arrive at Apapa on Thursday and will probably be diverted, he said.

‘Some Sort of Misunderstanding’

Moller complained that despite repeated inquiries, there has been no official response from Nigeria. “We were told it has to be decided by higher authorities,” he related. “It must be some sort of bureaucratic misunderstanding.”

The blocked shipments are generating an air of desperation in Chad, according to Wickens, who directs the U.N. group’s food distribution there.

“There is already a high level of malnutrition,” he said. “A team from the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta said in February that if we are not able to increase the level of food soon, starvation will reach Ethiopian proportions.”

He said that during March, his organization had planned to distribute 10,000 tons of food in Chad but received only 120 tons because of the tie-up at Apapa. Another 100,000 tons must move through the Nigerian port before the rainy season begins at the end of June, he said.

‘Critical Period’ Ahead

“If we can’t manage this, then the country is going to be in very bad shape,” Wickens added. “This is the critical period.”

Moller and Wickens said that the ships could go to two other Nigerian harbors, Port Harcourt and Calabar, but that neither could handle such quantities and that land shipment to Chad would be painfully, perhaps fatally, delayed.

Moller said that if the Nigerian bottleneck is not relieved soon, his organization will be forced to consider an airlift as the last hope of beating the rainy season, when trucks from the ports cannot get through. The cost for such an airlift would be at least $500 a ton, about four times the cost of land shipment.

“It is a horrendous prospect but if it’s a question of people dying, we will have no choice,” he said.