Cradling her 18-month-old daughter in one arm and a broom in the other, Harira Ado picks her way through a market in northern Nigeria looking for spilled grains to feed her family.
It’s a job that involves sweeping up behind the porters, squatting low to collect the tiny grains of maize that are inevitably dropped as they pile the sacks 2m high.
Ado, who’s 43 but looks frailer, isn’t the only one scavenging for spilled grains at this popular international market in the state of Katsina.
PHOTO: AFP
The mother of seven is among some 200 women who migrated from neighboring Niger in recent weeks where erratic rains led to a crop failure that has now brought about a severe food crisis.
The crisis extends beyond Niger. The UN says 10 million are affected in the Sahel region, a belt of land stretching right across northern Africa and covering parts of more than 10 countries.
Niger is worst hit, with more than 7 million people in need of food representing nearly half the population.
Ado abandoned her small groundnut oil business in her home village of Sola to walk for 20km across the border to look for food.
“I was forced by food need to come here. We have no food back home and we will all die if we stay,” she said in her local Hausa language.
“This is the same food situation that has brought all the women you see in this market,” she added with a smile, exposing her tobacco-stained teeth. “We all live on sweeping grains spilled in the dust during off-loading.”
As the food shortage bites, thousands of people, mainly women and children, have poured into Nigeria, with the men mostly turning to selling water to eke out a living.
Others take up menial jobs as housemaids in exchange for food, or just beg on the streets.
Victor Gbeho, the head of the west African regional bloc ECOWAS, expressed concern last week at the rate of migration from Niger due to the crisis.
The food refugees are concentrated in Nigeria’s northern states of Katsina, Jigawa, Kano, Sokoto and Borno.
On average Ado collects about 4kg of corn, millet, cowpeas — also known as black-eyed peas — and soya beans every week which she takes to her children back home.
She trades some of the soya beans with locals to raise cash for detergents and other non-food household items.
Unlike Ado, 45-year-old Samira Sani traveled from her village of Aljana, around 70km north of the border, with her entire family.
“I have no one to keep them with and I had to bring them along,” she said, ducking under a stationary truck to sweep pieces of maize spilt while porters off-loaded the sacks of grain.
Meanwhile peasant farmer Garba Lado, 60, said he left his home village of Tasawa, 45km away, a month ago, leaving no food for his family, and was in Maiadua selling water to raise money.
Niger’s transitional government launched a food distribution exercise last month for nearly 1.5 million people facing severe shortages, but Lado said the handouts were not enough.
It had already put out an emergency appeal in early March for international aid, warning famine was already affecting 58 percent of the population.
Nigerian immigration officials say they are helpless to control the influx of immigrants from Niger as the border is porous.
“Those with no valid papers don’t cross through the border posts,” said an immigration official at the Kongolam border post outside Maiadua. “But through the numerous illegal routes that are impossible to block.”
Katsina agriculture commissioner Sani Makana says authorities are aware of the influx and will stockpile grain for distribution to the refugees.
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