Weeks of flooding have killed nearly 200 people in Nigeria and washed away homes and farmlands, the country's disaster management agency said, further threatening food supplies, especially in the hard-hit northern region. The floods blamed on poor infrastructure and badly maintained dams have killed 185 people and displaced 208,000 in 28 of Nigeria's 36 states, the National Emergency Management Agency said in an update Friday, triggering frantic efforts to evacuate hundreds of thousands to makeshift shelters, per the AP. Nigeria records flooding every year mostly as a result of inadequate infrastructure and a failure to follow environmental guidelines. The worst floods the country has seen in a decade were in 2022, when more than 600 people were killed and more than 1 million displaced.
However, unlike in 2022, when the floods were blamed on heavier rainfall, the Nigerian Meteorological Agency predicted delayed or normal rains in most parts of the country this year and said the current floods were more a result of human activities. "What we are doing is causing this climate change, so there is a shift from the normal," said Wasiu Adeniyi Ibrahim, head of the central forecasting unit. "We have some who dump refuse indiscriminately, some build houses without approvals along the waterways." The Nigerian disaster response agency warned the flooding could get worse in the coming weeks as the floodwaters flow downward to the central and southern states.
"People [in flood-prone areas] need to evacuate now ... because we don't have time any longer," a spokesperson for the agency said. In Jigawa, the worst-hit state, which has recorded 37 deaths, the impact of the floods has been "devastating," and authorities are converting public buildings and schools into shelters for those displaced, according to the head of emergency services in the state. The floods have also so far destroyed 107,000 hectares of farmland, especially in the northern states, where most of Nigeria's harvests come from. Resident Abdullahi Gummi, located in the state of Zamfara, said the floods destroyed his family's farmlands, which are also their source of income. "We spent around $188 on planting, but everything is gone," Gummi said.
(More
Nigeria stories.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
