Early recovery in negative peace situations: Should we continue to plan for recovery during conflict or negative peace?

The pain of crisis can be cumbersome, it usually leaves a lot of people dead and others, dependent.

Crisis, both manmade and natural, have contributed to the degeneration of global standards, depleting the efforts of development workers in achieving an overarching Sustainable Development.

All around the world, people are faced with different crises – insurgency, terrorism, natural disasters, and environmental degradation, etc. which have resulted into myriads of multifaceted challenges of migration, displacement, hunger, poor education and health systems, food insecurity and lack of shelter, among others.

Experts have continued to argue that early recovery is a fundamental humanitarian tool and government and agencies must work together in building back better and smatter.

Recovery “interventions will facilitate not only easy restarting of lives but also provide a solid foundation for long term development,” says Edward Kallon, UNDP Resident Representative in Nigeria.

However, rebuilding during crisis might be very challenging. It takes serious orientation and security reassurance to convince the IDPs to return to their communities.

In Nigeria, for example, Ngwom Village in Borno State was recovered through funding from the Governments of Japan and Switzerland.

Over One million Dollars was spent to rebuild the extremely damaged village. UNDP employed local labourers to build over 300 units of houses for the 3000 people living in the community.

The construction project serves as a means of employment for the people who had lost their means of livelihood due to the conflict.

Recovering Ngwom was a strategic move; the village is located less than 15 kilometres to the main city, Maiduguri. The villagers are mostly farmers, renowned for their large scale production of grains.

The village market is an international economic hub attracting customers from neighbouring countries of Chad, Cameroon, and Niger. Over 3000 cattle were sold weekly in the market.

There used to be a traffic of trailers taking grains from the market to different part of the country. Reviving such market would contribute to revitalising the economic activities in the state which is currently in shambles.
Over a year after the villagers were returned to their community, the dividend of recovery is yet unobtainable.

The village is blockaded at entrance and exit by security forces, making it quite difficult for people to visit. The reconstructed market is empty, no economic activity has started.

People could not go to farm due to fear of being ambushed. “Truly, our lives were better than this before the crisis. I used to produce over 50 bags of Beans, Maize and Millet before they attacked us.

Though UNDP tried, they gave us farming implements and seedlings but we can’t produce like before, even if we produce, no market to sell,” says Goni Modu, a farmer and Imam in the village.

Despite the security checkpoints in the village, it has been attacked twice in 2019. One of the newly constructed buildings was burnt and other properties were destroyed. Though the military claimed victory for neutralising the terrorists and repelling further attacks, the damage had been done.

Teachers have stopped going to the village due to fear of further attacks. Though a primary school was constructed with modern facilities, children still play at home, with little hope of going back to school. There are no medicine or personnel at the reconstructed clinic. It was locked up.

Ya Hajja, one of the women elders, says; “Our women died during childbirth because there are no doctors in our clinic. If we are sick, we have to run to town for treatment, and that place is already overcrowded.”

The purpose of recovery is to encourage people to forget the shocks and trauma of crisis while providing them with an opportunity to live in a more conducive and sustainable situation.

However, this is difficult to achieve without positive peace. Recovery faces the threat of being reprised if the belligerent groups still have access to the area.

We face the threat of losing value for money while there are millions of other people in Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps, in need of basic relief assistance.

Successful recovery would require serious collaboration with security personnel. The role of humanitarian workers is to provide relief and encourage sustainable livelihoods for victims.

In periods of negative peace, if we must recover, security architecture must be strong, resilient and encouraging. If we cannot get the dividends immediately, should we continue to recover?

Abdulhakeem Abdulkareem is a research student at the Nigerian Defence Academy. He is interested in Humanitarian and development nexus in post-crisis recovery. Reach him on twitter or LinkedIn