Nigeria is among the world's ten worst hunger countries. The lean season starts in June.

Two days before the Ibadan Declaration, the UN released the 2026 Global Report on Food Crises.

Nigeria is on the list. Top ten. Alongside Sudan, Yemen, Afghanistan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Those are countries that have been formally at war for years.

The number is 35 million. That's how many Nigerians are projected to face acute food insecurity during the 2026 lean season, running June to August. Acute means the kind of hunger where families aren't skipping meals because money is tight. They're skipping because there is no food. The kind where children arrive at health posts with the visible wasting that charities put on billboards.

The epicentre is Borno. Roughly 15,000 people in Borno State are classified at Phase 5 hunger. Catastrophic. One step from famine. The UN says it's the worst recorded in a decade.

What produces this isn't a mystery. Northern Nigeria's farming communities have been under sustained attack for years. Jama'at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin, an al-Qaeda affiliate, carried out its first confirmed attack in Nigeria last year. ISWAP is expanding across the Sahel. These aren't abstract security events. When insurgents attack a farming community, they don't just kill people. They scatter them. In the past four months alone, 3.5 million people fled their homes across northern Nigeria. When 3.5 million people flee, the farms don't get planted. The grain stores don't get restocked. June arrives and there's nothing there.

The World Food Programme has been warning about its funding shortfall since January. They need $129 million to sustain Nigeria operations through the lean season. The money hasn't arrived.

The report placed Nigeria on a list with countries fractured by declared wars. Nigeria hasn't declared one. But in Borno, Adamawa, Yobe, and parts of the northwest, what those communities are living inside is difficult to distinguish from wartime conditions. The difference is that nobody in Abuja has called it an emergency requiring emergency resources.

35 million people are counting down to June. The political class is counting down to 2027. Both clocks are running at the same time.

There's a specific image that comes from the WFP's reporting on what happens when their funding runs out. People in the camps in the northeast leave. Not because conditions improve. Because they go looking for food somewhere else. Some try to migrate south. Some, as the WFP's Nigeria director has said directly, join insurgent groups to feed themselves and their families. That's what acute funding failure looks like when it touches a community. It doesn't look like a statistic. It looks like a father making a calculation about how to keep his children alive.

The Global Report on Food Crises was released on a Friday. By Saturday, the political class was in Ibadan discussing 2027. Both things happened. Neither cancelled the other out.