More than 17 million people across nine northern states are facing crisis, emergency or catastrophic hunger. The UN needs $89 million to keep food moving. It does not have it.

The World Food Programme says more than 17 million people across nine conflict-affected states in northern Nigeria are now experiencing crisis, emergency or catastrophic levels of hunger. That is a rise of almost two million people since the last count. Nationwide, 36.2 million Nigerians are food insecure.

Borno carries the worst of it. More than three million people there are acutely food insecure, over 750,000 of them in severe hunger, and more than 10,000 facing outright catastrophic conditions. WFP's regional director, Kinday Samba, said the violence driving this used to sit inside the northeast. It is spreading now, across a wider area, forcing more people off their farmland.

WFP can currently support only 740,000 of the 6.2 million food insecure people across the three worst-hit northeastern states, down from 1.3 million a year ago. The agency needs $89 million over the next six months to keep food and nutrition assistance moving. It doesn't have it yet.

This is not a story about capacity. Nigeria's court system found and is now recovering ₦212.8 billion from one man's estate this week, a sum worth roughly $135 million at current exchange rates. That is more than the entire humanitarian shortfall WFP is asking the world to close. One is a legal process that took eight months. The other is a funding appeal that has sat unanswered for weeks while women are reporting they risk kidnapping and assault every time they leave a camp to collect firewood.

The access problem is getting worse alongside the funding problem. The number of locations WFP staff cannot safely reach has doubled in recent months, with 15 more areas now considered partially inaccessible. Cargo routes into Borno, Adamawa and Yobe are increasingly disrupted by attacks and illegal checkpoints. That means even the money that does arrive struggles to reach the camps it was meant for. In many locations, airlifts are now the only way supplies move at all.

Nobody is arguing the two pots of money are interchangeable, or that recovered assets should simply be wired to WFP. But the contrast is instructive. When the state decides something matters enough, it can move fast, hold a case together for months, and land a result. Feeding 5.5 million people who currently get nothing has not been treated with that same urgency. WFP warns that hungry young people are joining armed groups for a few dozen cents a day just to eat. Some of those people are in the same nine states where the state has, this year, proven it can move with precision when it wants to.