The regime of President Muhammadu Buhari has blamed God for the flooding that have ravaged states across the country.
Most federating units have recently experienced flooding that has wrecked havoc, causing the death of hundreds and rendering millions homeless, figures from the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) showed.
This is coming amid reports that the flood crisis is caused by the release of water from the Lagdo dam situated in nearby Cameroon, a claim now refuted by the Minister of Water Resources, Suleiman Adamu.
Defending his ministry’s budget on Wednesday, Mr Adamu explained that about 80 per cent of the flood crisis was caused by rainfall from God.
“All these stories I’ve been seeing on social media, I just laugh because they are misleading,” the minister said. “The contribution of the Lagdo dam to flooding in this country is only one per cent. Sometimes they release the water without notice and when they do that, it has an impact on communities downstream.
“But it is not the main reason we have floods in this country — 80 per cent 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 had not released any water, but they said they would inform us. Finally, they said they would 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, as I said, the contribution to the flood by Lagdo dam is not so high,” he reiterated.
