Floods that have left hundreds of thousands of Africans homeless across vast swathes of the continent have claimed 64 lives in Nigeria and 33 in Burkina Faso, government and aid officials said on Thursday.
Nigeria’s Red Cross said the death toll covered a period since mid-July, while 22 000 people have been displaced in 10 sometimes arid northern states of the most populous nation in Africa, as well as in the Lagos area, the huge economic capital in the south-west.
The minister of social action and national solidarity in landlocked Burkina Faso, one of West Africa’s poorest nations, said 33 people had been killed over a similar period and almost 7 500 homes had been destroyed.
Further to the north, administrative officials in Algeria reported 13 deaths in violent storms and flash floods at the end of last week, which swamped parts of districts inland from the Mediterranean coast.
These figures come in the wake of a warning by aid agencies on Tuesday that neither they nor the governments in 22 African countries can cope with further rains and a humanitarian crisis that has affected at least 1,5-million people from one side of the continent to the other.
The floods of 2007 are the worst in 30 years, according to weather experts, and they have hit all the harder in a stretch of Africa across from Sudan, the most seriously affected nation in the east, to the sub-Saharan nations of the west where people, their crops and the soil have been more accustomed to cycles of drought.
In Algeria alone, officials on Thursday said that the cost of damage caused just last Friday and Saturday was estimated at €21-million.
”The rains have never been as heavy as this,” Red Cross spokesperson Patrick Bawa said in Nigeria on Thursday. ”Even now, in most of the 10 states, the rains are still pouring down heavily, so we are really worried that more people might be displaced or affected.”
Houses destroyed
In many nations like Nigeria, victims are living in makeshift camps or have managed to take refuge with relatives and friends, but the floods also mean a lack of fresh water and the risk of highly contagious water-borne diseases and malaria.
Burkina Faso Social Action Minister Pascaline Tamini said that crops had been lost over a third of the flooded 15 000ha, while 40 000 people had been displaced and about 100 seriously injured.
”We don’t know how many households won’t be able to harvest or have lost their cereal reserves,” she added, while the administration had no tents to shelter the homeless until Morocco offered to send 400, and the United States and the UN Children’s Fund came up with emergency aid to meet immediate needs worth more than €180 000 between them.
The worst floods in living memory in Sudan have killed 150 people, made hundreds of thousands homeless and cost the country an estimated $300-million in damages, a Sudanese official said on Thursday.
”We have about 73 000 houses completely destroyed and 29 000 partially destroyed,” said Hamadallah Adam Ali, head of Sudan’s civil defence authority.
Wealthy European Union countries and the United States have pledged millions of euros and dollars to assist, while the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation on Tuesday said that it will spend the full extent of its resources, totalling $12-million.
Heavy rains have been for decades part of regular life in August and September, but African government officials this year made no bones about telling the current United Nations General Assembly that the torrential downpours and floods are a wake-up call to climate change. — Sapa-AFP, Reuters