A screen grab from a new video released on Sunday by Boko Haram showing its members patrolling the streets of one of its captured towns in the North-East last year.
The World Bank has unfolded a package that will see it spend up to $2.1bn to rebuild badly devastated areas in the North-East ravaged in the past six years by the Boko Haram insurgency.
A statement by the Special Adviser to the President on Media and Publicity, Mr. Femi Adesina, said the announcement was made during a meeting that President Muhammadu Buhari had with representatives of the World Bank, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Health Organisation in Washington DC, United States, as part of activities marking his four-day state visit to the US.
The statement read in part, “The President urged the World Bank to send a team, which would work in concert with a team from the Federal Government, so that a proper assessment of needs could be done.
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“The World Bank will spend $2.1bn through its International Development Agency, which gives low interest rate loans to governments. The first 10 years will be interest-free, while (the interest for the) additional 30 years will be at lower than the capital market rate.
“The World Bank is eager to move in quickly, give out the loans and give succour to the people of the North-East, long at the mercy of an insurgency that has claimed over 20,000 souls.”
Adesina added that the WHO would also invest $300m in immunisation against malaria in Nigeria, while the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation would collaborate with the Dangote Foundation to ensure that the country maintained its zero polio case record of the past one year.
If the effort is sustained for another two years, the presidential spokesman said Nigeria would be declared fully free of polio.
Buhari had said priority must be given to the resettlement of people who were displaced internally as a result of the activities of the Boko Haram sect in the North-East.
He put the number of the affected persons at over one million.
Adesina quoted the President as saying that apart from rebuilding the affected region in terms of infrastructure, priority must also be given to the Internally Displaced Persons.
