80,000 Thousand Nigerians To Be Deported From Cameroon

• Scores of them from Central Africa

• FG, NEMA prepare camp

• Adamawa cries for help

Adamawa State’s Commissioner for Information, Comrade Ahmed Sajoh, has said that Cameroon is set to deport over 80,000 Nigerians into the country through the state.
The deportees are victims of Boko Haram who became refugees in Cameroon and other Nigerians resident in Central Africa who were dumped in various camps in Cameroon before the current government’s move to deport them. While the current deportees are natives of various states of the federation, the move is coming months after some 15,000 others of Adamawa, Yobe and Borno states’ origin were deported.
Accordingly, the state government has called on the Federal Government, as well as international donor agencies, to come to the rescue of the state because of its inability to single-handedly cater for the teeming deportees. Comrade Sajoh made the call when he, alongside the Federal Government’s delegation, visited the proposed site where the deportees would be hosted.
Sajoh noted that the call becomes imperative in view of the sheer size of the deportees and the nature of the proposed camp which he said needed complete rehabilitation. He noted that even perimeter fencing on the facility would cost the state enormous funds, let alone providing other basic infrastructure, adding that, the state government had serious financial constraint, especially in view of the cash crunch facing the country.
Sajoh added, the state government had already constituted a committee which would liaise with relevant stakeholders to see how best to tackle the issue including profiling of all deportees in order to ensure water tight security around the facility.
In his reaction, the Adamawa State Camps Coordinator of National Emergency Management Authority (NEMA), Saad Bello, noted that his organisation had made adequate arrangement to ensure that the deportees were adequately catered for.
He noted that the camp would need about 15 motorized boreholes and a number of hand pumps to take care of the water needs of the deportees as well as hundreds of toilets, adding that the challenges of hosting the deportees was enormous.
In his reaction, leader of the delegation and Senior Special Assistant to President Muhammadu Buhari on Policy, Development and Analysis, Ibrahim Bapetel, urged the various stakeholders to prepare a comprehensive needs report for onward transmission to the Federal Government.
He said that due to the Federal Government’s concern for the plight of the deportees, he was optimistic that the needs report would be treated with dispatch. Bapetel emphasized on the huge number of the deportees and called on International donors to come to the assistance of the Federal Government in addressing the myriads of challenges that would accrue from handling the deportees.