Nigeria’s Worst Floods And What Must Be Done

 By Banke Oniru

This year’s flooding came like a thief in the night unexpectedly and left a devastating effect on the land.

Bayelsa is among 33 of 36 Nigerian states grappling with the devastation effect of the country’s worst flooding in a decade. More than 600 lives have been lost in the floods across the affected region and a projection that almost 1.5 million people have been displaced while almost 3.5 million people had been affected, according to the humanitarian ministry.

Are we saying that the ministry responsible for the monitoring of the weather didn’t get the wind that such a disaster was lurking? And if they did, what did they do, and what was done to notify or evacuate people from the right of way of the long shadow of the flood?

In order to prevent the reoccurrence of this disaster in the future, the government needs to do some of the following:

• Be More proactive to ensure that such national disaster are prevented with high-tech disaster/flood detection system.
• Building of canal along the flood prone channels in order to create an avenue for the snake-like flood to pass peacefully without causing havoc to any obstruction on the way.
•  Widening of gutters and pathways – the gutters and water ways need to be cleared of dirt, debris and other items. Each local authorities should be compelled to widen as a matter of urgency, and if possible pull down structures that are obstructing water ways across the country.
• Building of dikes and levees – Dikes and levees are embankments constructed to prevent flooding. Levees may be formed naturally or artificially. They prevent the water from overflowing and flooding surrounding areas. Dikes are walls that hold back the sea.
• Water Harvesting – this generally refers to the collection of rainstorm-generated runoff from a particular area (a catchment) in order to provide water for human, animal, or crop use. This would come handy during the dry season when water are scarce.
•  Pipe Jacking Technology (Underground drainage) – this was implemented in Uyo, Akwa Ibom State, to tackle Uyo’s Perennial Flood Problem and it’s been quite effective. So deploying this solution across the needed area may be the panacea to this perennial problem.

In conclusion, as the 2023 general election comes knocking on the doors, the flooding issues under the climate change should be part of the problems that voters need to consider in order to choose their preferred candidates for governance.

It’s essentially important to have representatives either at the state capitals or the Federal Capital Territory that would take climate change effect seriously. Those 600 Nigerians that lost their lives didn’t have to die such excruciating deaths and so are the displaced folks, they don’t deserve these displacement if the present and past governments had done their due diligence to fix the problem or had the foresight to look into the horizon.

*Banke Oniru is an environmentalist