The Nigerian government has dismissed a warning from the United Nations that famine is looming in the country.
The country’s agriculture minister says the U.N. is exaggerating the situation, and that no one is facing starvation.
The comments from Minister Audu Ogbeh are the first official reaction from the Nigerian government to the U.N.’s famine forecast.
The West African nation’s presidency last year accused the U.N. of talking up Nigeria’s problems with an aim of raising money.
The U.N. is particularly worried about the country’s troubled north-east region. It fears hundreds of thousands there face starvation – many of them children.
A delegation from the U.N. Security Council has been visiting the region in recent days, and has maintained that the situation is indeed dire.
“The scale of the humanitarian crisis is being exaggerated? No i don’t think it has, i think the scale we have seen is of a growing crisis, famine is being averted because of the genorisity of donors and the effectiveness of national responses but only just, we urge the international community as whole to continue to step up before it is too late and that should be right now and that is one of the messages that we would be taking back to New York,” Matthew Rycroft, U.K. Ambassador to the United Nations said.
The UN is seeking $1 billion from for the region. It estimates 6-million need emergency assistance – and says that figure could soon swell.
