As climate change inflicts more devastation on the environment, the least the federal government can do is mitigate the effects of disasters that are known to be constant. It is almost a decadal ceremony that Cameroon opens her Lagdo Dam. Knowing the regular destruction the resultant flood leaves in its path should put the government in readiness to mitigate any impending situation and save its people from death and suffering.
This is usually preceded by copious warnings from the Nigeria Meteorological Agency (NiMet).
As of Friday, July 14, more than 500 people had lost their lives in 32 affected states, with tens of thousands of homes, as well as millions of hectares of farmland submerged. That bodes acute food shortage, with consequent inflation for Nigeria.
With food inflation already hovering around 24 per cent, Nigerians are almost bound to suffer the throes of a hunger crisis.
Millions of individual Nigerians and corporations who have invested in agriculture are already feeling the loss.
Sharehe, the country’s largest farmland of 10,000 hectares in Nasarawa State, owned by Olam and worth about $140 million investment has been submerged by floods, according to Ade Adefeko, vice president of external relations and stakeholder management at Olam Agri.
“Our entire 4,400 hectare of rice is submerged by the flood,” Adefeko said in a response to questions, describing it as a big loss for the company and Nigeria as well as a setback to the country’s food security quest.
“We had been battling the waters for two weeks but the water pressure took over and broke the 57 km dykes surrounding the farm,” he said.
It is noteworthy that more than 70 per cent of Nigerians take part in agricultural activities at the subsistence level, according to government data, with the sector contributing almost 30 per cent of the country’s total GDP in 2021, according to Statista.
The president of the All Farmers Association of Nigeria, Kabiru Ibrahim, said, “Flooding in Nigeria has long been worsened by familiar factors, including inadequate infrastructure and underfunded flood defenses. It is being further exacerbated by climate change. The country’s food security is being undermined as a result. That’s why the issue of flooding, which is a decadal ceremony, should have been given top priority long before now to, at least mitigate its effects.”
And mitigating the effects of flooding is doable. According to the minister of water resources, Suleiman Adamu, “Large amounts of sediment are brought down the River Niger from the Sahara every year, and when there are intense rains the capacity of the river bed cannot take it, causing the river to burst its banks.
“Nigeria, therefore, requires an engineering solution in the form of an extensive programme of dredging, creating embankments, reclaiming certain floodplains, and straightening some of the sharp bends of its rivers,” he said.
He estimated that the country would need about $14billion to undertake such work, and it would be the work of several administrations, but that it was important to have a master plan in place.
Interestingly, in its annual budgets, Nigeria makes provision for the Ecological Fund to mitigate the effects of natural disasters. What has it been used for in the past?
Compared to the destruction the floods leave in their paths, $14 billion is infinitesimal.
Before this recent round of flooding, over 105 million Nigerians were living in extreme poverty, according to data from the World Poverty Clock of the Brookings Institute.
The World Bank recently projected that the accelerating inflation will push an additional seven million into poverty by the end of 2022 in its report ‘The Continuing Urgency of Business Unusual.’ That number is bound to increase with the recent turn of events.
“Survival is the most difficult thing in Nigeria now irrespective of whether you are in the upper, middle or lower income class as there is no source of income the surging inflation is not affecting,” Benson Salami-Olayanju, chairman of Panfcm-Tech-Wise Treasure Investment, has said.
The development is also expected to have an impact on security, which, in turn, will have a spiraling effect on food security.
Security analyst at Lagos-based SBM Intelligence, Confidence MacHarry, said, “Increased conflicts driven by poverty will more than likely continue to make achieving food security difficult if flooding continues to persist.”
Some effects of conflict-driven hunger are already being seen in some northern regions of the country. In late September, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) said that a malnutrition crisis in northwest Nigeria is reaching “catastrophic levels,” with a 64 per cent increase over the previous year in the number of severely malnourished children it had treated.
Though the economic loss cannot be ascertained, for now, the Nigeria Meteorological Agency (NiMet) has said states in the North Central and South East in Nigeria should brace up for more flooding.
In Nigeria, flooding is experienced annually in both urban and rural areas. 2012 was the last pan Nigeria flooding.
Between the months of July and October of that year, 30 out of Nigeria’s 36 states were submerged by flood.
By mid-October, 2.1 million persons had been displaced from their homes; over 400 persons died; many homes were destroyed.
The National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) calculated the cost of the losses at about N2.6 trillion and described the floods as the worst in 40 years.
