Recent floods killed at least 50 persons in 11 communities in Adamawa and injured 71 others, the Executive Secretary of Adamawa Emergency Management Agency (ADSEMA), Malam Suleiman Mohammed, has said.
He blamed the flooding on the release of water from Lagdo Dam in neighbouring Cameroon.
Mohammed spoke two days after the Minister of Water Resources, Mr. Suleiman Adamu, advised Nigerians to stop blaming water released from Lagdo dam in Cameron as the major cause of flood in Nigeria, stressing that 80 percent of the floods in Nigeria was caused by rainfall and not Cameroon’s Lagdo dam as widely believed.
Adamu said:“All these stories I’ve been seeing on social media, I just laugh, because they are misleading.
“The contribution of the Lagdo dam to flooding in this country is only one percent. Sometimes they release the water without notice and when they do that, it has impact on communities downstream.
“But it is not the main reason we have floods in this country — 80 percent of the floods in this country is water that we are blessed with from God from the sky.
“This year’s flood, I can assure you, we cannot blame it on Cameroon to be sincere.
“We’ll continue to have floods on the river Niger and Benue basins. We signed the MOU with the Cameroonian authorities but since then, every year, it is the Nigeria Hydrological Services Agency (NIHSA) that calls them ‘what is your level in Lagdo? “
“Even this one when he called them, I was communicating with the DG NIHSA, I said ‘what’s happening in Cameroon?’ He said he has been calling them and they said they have not released any water but they said they will inform us.
” Finally, they said they will inform us tomorrow, they didn’t inform us, they informed us 24 hours after they had released the water”.
“They did the same thing two years ago, I wrote to the minister of foreign affairs and Nigeria had to write a protest letter to the Cameroonian authorities that they did not inform us.
“It was after our rains had gone down, suddenly we saw floods in Adamawa area and we were asking them. For two weeks, they were denying that they had opened the reservoir. Of course, it didn’t go to the confluence, it was limited to the areas of Adamawa state and Taraba. Because like I said, the contribution to the flood by Lagdo dam is not so high.”
From Adamawa, Mohammed told the News Agency of Nigeria that the flood destroyed 172,000 farmlands and food crops worth millions of naira.
“Some of the affected local government areas are Numan, Shelleng, Yola South, Yola North, Demsa, Mayo Belwa and Michika,’’ he said.
He added that the agency had provided clothes, foodstuffs, drugs, mosquito nets, blankets and buckets for victims to assuage their suffering.
“The items were donated by the state government, the Federal Government and by other donors,’’ he said.
Mohammed also told that ADSEMA would collaborate with the National Emergency Management Agency to move affected communities to safer areas.
“We will continue to sensitise the communities about the dangers of living in flood-prone areas,’’ he said.