After Boko Haram insurgents took her daughter from a village in Borno, Hajara Tukur lost her husband, her home, and nearly her own life. Now resettled in Adamawa, she lives with leaking roofs, hunger, and the unanswered question of whether her child is alive.
Hajara Tukur still keeps her daughter’s wrapper folded at the bottom of a wooden box beside her bed. Some nights, when sleep refuses to come, she presses the cloth against her face, trying to remember the daughter who first made her a mother in Gulak, a town in Madagali local government area of Adamawa State, northeastern Nigeria.
Other nights, her thoughts drift back to life in Gulak, when her husband struggled to make ends meet as a commercial driver along the Mubi–Maiduguri highway while she traded rice and groundnuts at local markets in the area.
Hafsat, her eldest daughter, helped with cooking and other household chores when she left for the market. She also plaited her younger siblings’ hair in neat lines, fetched water from the hand-pump borehole near their house, and often spoke about becoming a tailor.
“She had even learned how to sew simple children’s clothes from our neighbour,” Hajara recalled.
At 17, Hafsat married a relative and moved to a community along the Gwoza–Pulka axis. Just a year into her marriage, in 2016, insurgents attacked the village at night. By morning, what was left were burnt houses and news that girls and young women had been abducted.
“The news of the attack and abduction reached us in Gulak, and we learned that Hafsat was among those taken,” Hajara said. “Her husband and some relatives searched from house to house in the community, but nobody had seen her. I went there myself, but there was still no word about her.”
Two years later, Hajara’s husband died after a brief illness, leaving her alone with three children. She then turned to farming to survive, and in one of those trips to the farm, she got captured by the insurgents. While she was held in the forest, her children found refuge with her younger brother who also lives in Gulak.
“I spent 16 months moving across different camps in the forest, working as a domestic servant for insurgents, and watching new captives arrive,” she said. “Hunger thinned my body and I kept falling sick. I was always thinking about Hafsat. I wondered where she was, and whether she was still alive.”
In 2021, during a clash between insurgents and the Nigerian military, Hajara escaped and walked for days before reaching a military checkpoint where she was later taken to the Malkohi Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp in Yola, the Adamawa State capital. Now, several years later, Hajara still does not know whether her daughter is alive or dead.
Across northeastern Nigeria, thousands of families remain trapped in the same uncertainty. Since the Boko Haram insurgency began in 2009, entire communities have been forced to flee their homes. Women and children have been abducted, men killed or taken away, and countless families separated in the chaos of attacks, displacement, and arbitrary military operations, often without any clear record of what happened to their loved ones.
For mothers like Hajara, each day without her daughter comes with a silent pain that she has not been able to heal from. “If she (Hafsat) died, I want to know,” she said. “If she is alive, let me see her. At least, I will be relieved of the thinking.”
Since the escalation of violence in northeastern Nigeria in 2014, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has registered about 24,000 people as missing across the country, which is the largest number recorded in any conflict setting in Africa. The organisation said more than 14,000 families are still searching for information about the fate of relatives who disappeared during the insurgency.
The majority of these disappearances are linked to the conflict in the northeast. The organisation reports that more than nine in ten cases are a result of the insurgency, and over half of those who went missing were children at the time. In just the first six months of 2020, the ICRC opened more than 360 new cases in Nigeria alone.
Through its Restoring Family Links programme, the ICRC conducts tracing and documentation to reconnect families separated by armed conflict and displacement. However, the scale of the problem remains overwhelming. María Toscano, Protection of Family Links Team Leader at the ICRC, said limited access to conflict-affected areas and difficulties reaching families continue to hamper efforts.
In 2023, the then Nigerian Minister for Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development, Sadiya Farouk, publicly acknowledged that the country still lacks reliable data on people who have gone missing during conflict and displacement. This came several years after the National Human Rights Commission announced plans to establish a database for missing persons.
Under Nigeria’s constitution and as a party to key international treaties, including the Geneva Conventions and the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, the state has a legal duty to investigate disappearances, account for people in custody, and inform families of the fate or whereabouts of their loved ones.
“Behind every missing person is a family living in uncertainty and pain. Families have the right to know what happened to their loved ones. Meeting their long-term needs, whether legal, administrative, economic or psychosocial, is a humanitarian imperative and key to peace and reconciliation,” stated Cristian Rivier, Head of the ICRC’s Central Tracing Agency.
Human rights groups said those obligations remain largely unmet. They call on Nigerian authorities to open detention facilities to independent scrutiny, release detainees who have not been formally charged, and intensify efforts to locate civilians still held by Boko Haram.
In June 2023, while still living in the Malkohi IDP camp, Hajara’s name appeared on a list of families selected for relocation to permanent housing at the Labondo resettlement site in Girei local government area of Adamawa State. She became one of about 2,700 people moved from the overcrowded camp to a new settlement of 454 housing units, each equipped with its own toilet. Officials told the beneficiaries that the homes were free as part of the Labondo Local Integration Pilot Project managed by the Adamawa State Government in partnership with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), also known as the UN Refugee Agency.
The initiative aims to support long-term reintegration for displaced communities by combining humanitarian assistance with development and peace-building efforts while promoting social cohesion and economic self-reliance.
Hajara now lives in a two-bedroom house with her children and grandchildren. It has concrete walls, a lockable door, and a small veranda. But these comforts have not brought her peace. Each time it rains, water seeps through the leaking roof, soaking the floor and her belongings.
“The roof leaks from the top,” she said. “I don’t know why it’s so, but whenever there is heavy rain, we cannot sleep.” On many nights, however, it is not the leaking roof that keeps her awake, but thoughts of where her daughter might be.
Meanwhile, food is also harder to find at the Labondo resettlement site, Hajara said. Some days, she goes two or three days without anything to cook. “Together with my grandchildren, we survive on small portions shared by neighbours who were themselves hungry in most cases,” Hajara noted.
Still, through the food shortages and sleepless nights, Hajara, now 50, continues waiting for her daughter’s return. She said she holds on to the belief that Hafsat is alive and that one day, she will see her again.
Writer: Yahuza Bawage
Editors: Amaka Obioji, Chimee Adioha
Image: Diaspora Africa
This story was produced under the HumAngle Foundation’s Strengthening Community Journalism and Human Rights Advocacy in Northern Nigeria (SCOJA) Fellowship, supported by the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Nigeria.