Anambra State Governor Chukwuma Soludo on Tuesday lamented the effect of ravaging floods in his state.
The governor, who spoke on Channels Television’s Sunrise Daily programme, said one-third of Anambra State has been submerged by flood, a situation he said, has turned the already “bad situation” of the state as the “erosion capital of Nigeria” to “worse”.
He said, “The fundamental thing for us is not so much the ravage of this flood, it has made a bad situation worse for us in Anambra.
“The environment is Anambra’s number one existing threat. Anambra is the gully erosion capital of Nigeria with about 30 percent of our lands under threat by gully erosion.”
The former Central Bank of Nigeria governor said his administration had been “cleaning up drainages just to let water get to the river but now water from the rivers now overwhelm one-third of the state, even a little more than one-third of the state”.
On the way forward, Soludo advised that Nigeria initiate a national emergency conversation about flooding to avert recurrence.
“What is the nation doing to prepare for the next one because we know that it will happen again and again? It has been happening, and Cameroon will soon open the dam in the next one or two years. What is the national plan to deal with the next one? Whether we are going to build dams or embankments along the banks of the rivers. I think as a nation, we need a national emergency conversation,” he said.
On the National Emergency Management Agency response to flood victims, the governor said that though NEMA has been discharging its responsibilities in the state alongside the state government, the agency’s response is “too little” and “too late”.
According to Soludo, the National Assembly must come up with a forceful response to flooding which has become a perennial disaster in the country.
Responding to the presidency claim that states have ecological fund to address flooding issues in their states, Soludo described the fund from the Federal Government to Anambra as peanuts.
Speaking floods in some areas of the nation on August 23, 2022, the presidency has described it as a state emergency rather than a national catastrophe.
“Each of the three tiers, the local government, the state government and the federal government has a sizeable budget at its disposal, allocated monthly precisely for dealing with these state-level natural emergencies, as well as federal agencies dedicated to doing the same,” Buhari’s media aide, Garba Shehu had said.
But Soludo said, “I would have asked him (Shehu) what this allocation is for dealing with this kind of ravaging (situation) where flood sacks almost eight local governments at once and hundreds of billions worth of assets and livelihood?
“I would bet that if you spend 50% of the entire Ecological Fund in Anambra State in one year, it will be significant but touch 20% of the problem. Anambra is a national emergency by itself, by the nature of the ecological challenge that requires special funding and attention because one-third of the land of Anambra is under threat.”
According to NEMA about 2.5 million persons had been affected, and over 603 persons killed by flooding caused by torrential rainfall of late.
The worse hit states include Lagos, Yobe, Borno, Taraba, Adamawa, Edo, Delta, Kogi, Niger, Plateau, Benue, Ebonyi, Anambra, Bauchi, Gombe, Kano, Jigawa, Zamfara, Kebbi, Sokoto, Imo, Abia States, and the Federal Capital Territory.