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Over 15 children have been born at the Ox-bow Lake Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) and other camps scattered across the state within the last two weeks of camping as a result of the ravaging flood that submerged virtually the entire state.
Among them were three sets of twins, a triplet and others that were born single across government and private camps.
According to the chairman of BAYELSA State Emergency Management Agency (BYSEMA), Igrubia Walaman, the children and their mothers are in good health as the government is doing its best to give them the best care that they need.
This is as the body responsible for the mitigation and management of the natural disaster has commenced the distribution of food items to private IDP camps in the state capital.
Places the committee headed by the Commissioner for Environment, Iselema Gbaranbiri, distributed palliatives to include the IDP camps at the secretariat of the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ), the Issac Boro College of Education, the St Mathias Catholic Primary school, among others.
The BYSEMA chairman while briefing journalists on the distribution of relief materials to some of the private IDP camps within the Yenagoa metropolis, said the initial distribution by the sub-committee didn’t get to the people as expected.
He said, “For sure, not everybody can get to government-created IDP camps. Some people decided to stay back by finding higher ground and organised themselves into camps.
“The first relief materials we distributed, most of them were not captured because we didn’t know the pattern the sub-committee was using and so there were a lot of complaints here and there from the private IDP camps that the thing didn’t go down well with them”.
“So, we decided to go back to the drawing board, made some investigations and came out with some identified clusters and picked a handful of them, and that is what the central committee is doing by reaching out to them and to let them know that government also feels their pain.
“We are starting with Yenagoa metropolis and I think after this exercise, the complains will be reduced.”
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Igrubia said the same thing will be replicated at the various local government level where the sub-committee will identify some private IDP camps and supply them with food items.
“Whether they are in the camp or on the street, if they are displaced they are displaced and besides, almost everybody is affected. So in any way the committee can reach out, we will do it. The only thing we can not do right now is to go from door to door. But if they come together and form a camp, we will give them relief materials.”
Also speaking, the chairman of the 2022 Floods and Mitigation Committee, Iselema Gbaranbiri said, the committee have been able to gather some relief materials from both air and the waterways as a result of the N900 million and released them in two tranches by the governor to the committee.
He said most of the items have been distributed to the local government areas through the sub-committee and they are still procuring more items within and outside the state.
“But the central committee is distributing some food items like garri, rice, beans amongst others to private IDP camps which we identified as clusters within the metropolis. The one handled by the sub-committee did not trickle down to them and we felt that as a central committee, we should also go to the private IDP camps and homes where people gathered together”.
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