AMINU ABUBAKAR, Kano | Monday
LTHE toll reported missing or dead after flash floods swept through northern Nigeria leapt on Sunday to more than 116, after floods ripped through Jigawa State.
Some 102 people are missing, feared dead, in Jigawa State, northeast Nigeria, after water released late Thursday by an overflowing dam swept through towns and villages, local community leader Sagir Mohammed told reporters.
Local leaders had conducted a search and found 102 men, women and children missing, the community leader said.
The area had already been hit by flooding affecting parts of Kano and Jigawa states since Monday.
Kano State authorities earlier in the week said they had confirmed 14 dead, swept away in the village of Kura.
Local relief workers said on Thursday that in the village of Gachi, 10 children were missing feared drowned and 30 people missing after a canoe carrying 30 people capsized on Wednesday near Gwaram in Jigawa State.
The Jigawa flooding on Thursday appeared more serious.
“102 people have been missing since Thursday and our belief is that they are dead,” Mohammed told reporters.
Some 20 000 residents of the local government areas of Ringim and Taura had been made homeless, he said.
On the outskirts of the partly submerged village of Zangon-Kara in the Taura local government area a farmer, Yahuza Umar, said he had escaped on Thursday but had lost all he owned.
“Everything I own has been lost, my house, my farm, everything,” he said. People now needed food and accommodation, he added.
Rabiu Na’allah, another farmer in the village, said two of his children were missing and he fears the worst.
“I am still in grief,” he said. “They were washed away and we have not found them.”
Jigawa Governor Ibrahim Turaki visited the area on Friday and has promised food, mats and blankets for the displaced, relief workers said.
“The situation is pathetic and frightening,” said the community leader Mohammed. “I am appealing to well-meaning Nigerians as well as the international community to come to the aid of these people,” he said.
Flooding is, in fact, a relatively frequent occurrence in northern Nigeria, occurring somewhere almost every year and in 1988 more than 300 000 people were made homeless by floods in Kano state.
In 1999 and again last year, tens of thousands of people were displaced by flooding in Niger State, the largest state in Nigeria, lying north-west of the capital Abuja and southwest of Kano.
Niger State representative Suable Mohammed Baddegi said that if the rains continue, 40 000 to 60 000 people’s homes would be threatened.
He said that, in all, half a million people live in the low-lying plains in Niger State, threatened every year by the risk of flooding.
Last weekend, heavy rains battered the region around the city of Kano, swelling dams already full after weeks of rains.
The Tiga and Shallawa dams overflowed on Monday, sending waters coursing down the main Wudil river, sweeping through towns and villages, carrying away people and livestock and smashing through mud-built homes. – AFP