For Fidelia Joseph day-to-day survival is more important than voting in Nigeria’s elections.

Joseph, 30, lives with her four children and about 6,000 other people displaced by attacks by the Islamist militant group Boko Haram at a camp in Yola, capital of the northeastern state of Adamawa. She fled her village of Bazza when, during a church service, she heard explosions. “I didn’t carry anything, I just ran with my children and my life,” she said in an interview outside a concrete room she shares with other women.


When she asked electoral officials how she could cast her ballot, they said she would have to pick up her biometric voter’s card in the city of Maiduguri, about 400 kilometers (250 miles) to the north where her husband Peter was killed last year. “You want to kill me?” she recalled replying. “You’re telling me to go to Maiduguri by road when Boko Haram is everywhere?”

Joseph is one of about 1.5 million people who’ve been forced to flee their homes as Boko Haram presses its six-year campaign to establish a self-styled caliphate in the northeast of Africa’s most populous nation.

The national security adviser’s office cited the disruption the war has caused in its push for a postponement of the elections for six weeks to March 28. Joseph said she and other victims of the violence have little confidence in the government.

“Our main problem is that we don’t know what our government is doing,” said Joseph, wearing a olive-green flowing garment known as a hijab. “Whether our president is dead alive, we don’t know. Because we don’t know what he is doing for us.”

Six-Week Delay

The Independent National Electoral Commission announced the ballot postponement on Feb. 7, saying the security forces had requested a six-week delay to restore “normalcy” in the northeast so the vote could be held in peace. It will also give INEC more time to finish distributing biometric cards to the 68.8 million registered voters.

The postponement helped extend the naira’s fall, with the currency declining 15 percent in the past six months against the dollar, the most among 24 African currencies tracked by Bloomberg. The Nigerian Stock Exchange All Share Index is down 42 percent over the same period in dollar terms, the second-worst performer in the world, after Ukraine.

Special Voting

Those displaced within the same state will be able to vote at specially created polling units in the state capitals. As of Feb. 6, about 270,000 people registered in Adamawa had collected their cards and will be able to vote in Yola, according to INEC data.

“All internally displaced people from Adamawa state, so long as their names are on our register and so long as they have their voters cards, they can vote,” Baba Abba Yusuf, the resident electoral commissioner for Adamawa state said in a Feb. 4 interview.

While the Nigerian army and forces from neighboring countries, particularly Chad, have made some gains against Boko Haram in recent weeks, the number of civilians fleeing the violence to camps in Adamawa is rising.

Boko Haram is increasingly seen as a regional threat, with Niger approving yesterday the deployment of about 750 soldiers to Nigeria. About 200,000 people have already fled Nigeria to neighboring countries, according to the European Union. Adamawa state alone houses about 400,000 displaced people, data from the union’s humanitarian aid arm shows.

Population Influx

“Looking at the percentage of those leaving and the percentage of those taken in, those coming in look much higher,” Haruna Hamman Furo, the permanent secretary of the Adamawa State Emergency Management Agency, said in a Feb. 4 interview.

With the influx of people fleeing the fighting having almost doubled the population of Yola, which had about 400,000 before the conflict, the city has attracted politicians from both President Goodluck Jonathan’s ruling People’s Democratic Party and the All Progressives Congress of his main rival in the presidential race, former military ruler Muhammadu Buhari.

“Politicians have been wanting to come here because of the number of people,” Bishop Stephen Dami Mamza said at St. Theresa’s Cathedral before volunteers distributed bags of rice to displaced women. “I told them if they want to give you anything, they can give it to me. No politicians are allowed here.”

Political Manipulation

A sea of women responded with cheers and raised arms as some of their children crawled in the aisles.

In a National Emergency Management Agency warehouse, stacks of rice donated by the government’s Victims Support Fund bear the images of President Jonathan. After published pictures of the rice bags sparked local criticism, the agency said it would “review its donor policy to address it.”

Political groups have even offered to take people out of the camps to collect their voter cards, Reuben Babatunde, who helps runs the biggest settlement for displaced people in Yola.

“We couldn’t allow that, because anything could happen to their cards on their way back,” he said.
Joseph said she isn’t too worried that she probably won’t be able to vote because she registered out of the state. She’s more concerned whether she’ll be able to return to Bazza where she used to sell pepper soup by the roadside and when she does, what she’ll find there.

“They’ve killed our husbands, they’ve killed our brothers, they’ve killed our fathers. They’ve even killed our mothers and kidnapped babies,” she said. “When we go back to our village, what will we do there?”

This story was culled From Blomberg Online Blog