In Nigeria’s long night of insecurity, childhood has learned to travel light. It moves with a mat, a pot, a memory of home folded into silence. The latest figures from the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) read less like statistics and more like a lament: of 9,290 internally displaced persons scattered across 11 states, 82 per cent are children—small bodies carrying a national crisis too heavy for their years.
Numbers, when they speak plainly, can wound. Eight out of every ten displaced Nigerians are children, the NHRC’s October 2025 Human Rights Dashboard reveals. In those figures lie interrupted lullabies, classrooms left roofless, immunisation cards lost to fire and flight. Displacement, once an emergency, has become an inheritance.
Presenting the report in Abuja, NHRC Executive Secretary, Dr. Tony Ojukwu (SAN), named the drivers with sobering clarity: insecurity that refuses to sleep, climate shocks that scorch livelihoods, and economies that collapse where farms once stood. The humanitarian emergency, he said, is deepening—layered, persistent, and increasingly youthful.
Yobe and Benue emerge as the epicentres of this ache. In Yobe, 2,047 people have been uprooted; in Benue, 1,850. The reasons are grimly familiar—herders’ attacks, insurgent raids, and the destruction of the very infrastructure that binds communities to hope. In the ashes of these assaults, children learn new geographies: camp layouts instead of playgrounds.
Displacement is never neutral for a child. As Ojukwu’s representative, Harry Obe, Director of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, noted, it exposes them to hunger and violence, pulls them from classrooms, and opens doors to health risks that linger long after the gunfire fades. For a child, insecurity is not an abstract policy failure; it is an empty bowl.
Beyond the IDP camps, the margins are crowded too. The dashboard records 215 asylum seekers grappling with registration hurdles in Taraba and Cross River, alongside 583 refugees clustered in the same corridor. There are also 472 returnees—81 per cent of them children—attempting to stitch normalcy back into communities still frayed by fear.
Even the glimmers of progress arrive with shadows. A UNHCR-backed protection project has reached over 15,000 vulnerable individuals since early 2025, an effort worthy of applause. Yet the applause is muffled by a 58 per cent surge in violations against children, a cruel reminder that assistance often runs behind violence.
The violations themselves read like a catalogue of broken rights. More than 1,800 cases were recorded in the reporting period. In Benue, Taraba and Kano, 530 people were denied access to food and shelter. In Yobe, 278 faced restrictions on movement as insecurity fenced in daily life.
The cruelty wears many faces. There were 195 incidents of gender-based violence, each one a private catastrophe. And in Kano and Taraba, 324 barriers to education rose like walls around the future, keeping children from chalkboards and possibilities alike.
Yet within the bleakness, there are hands at work. NHRC field teams resolved 372 cases and referred 1,157 to relevant agencies. They conducted 104 detention visits, reaching 326 detainees, and carried out 331 community outreaches, speaking to 6,551 people about GBV prevention and the pathways to report abuse.
These interventions are acts of insistence—the insistence that rights do not evaporate in crisis. They are reminders that documentation is itself a form of protection, that visibility can interrupt impunity, even when resources are thin and danger close.
Ojukwu, who also leads the Network of National Human Rights Institutions in West Africa, did not soften the obstacles. Transport shortages stall response, data costs bite into capacity, and security risks stalk monitors in the field. Still, resilience persists, buoyed in part by UNHCR’s support amid tightening humanitarian budgets.
The prescriptions are known, if not yet fully applied. Domesticate the Kampala Convention. Integrate NHRC data into humanitarian planning. Secure communities so returnees can rebuild without rehearsing escape routes. These are not lofty ideals; they are practical steps toward dignity.
Nigeria’s displaced population—estimated at 6.7 million—cannot be governed by emergency alone. Children, who form the bulk of this tide, require systems that outlast headlines: schools that reopen, clinics that remain stocked, farms that can be tilled without fear.
Until then, childhood will continue to be counted in percentages and paragraphs. And every new dashboard will echo the same question: how did a nation allow its youngest citizens to become the face of its displacement? The answer, like the children themselves, is already waiting—restless, hopeful, and in need of home.
_Amieyeofori Ibim is a seasoned Journalist, Political Analyst and Public Affairs Commentator_
Email: ibimdarlinton@gmail.com
Phone: 08112095925
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