By Brown Chimezie
The Renevlyn Development Initiative (RDI) has linked the collapse of the Alau Dam in Borno and the inundation of farmlands and hundreds of homes in Maiduguri, to a disconnect among the coordinating emergency response agencies of governments at federal and state levels.
In a statement, Executive Director of RDI said the collapse of the dam was avoidable, adding that the incident represents failure in governance at all levels since the floods had hitherto been predicted by the Nigeria Meteorological Agency (NIMET) and the Nigeria Hydrological Services Agency (NIHSA), yet no concrete, preemptive action on flood management plan was put in place to safeguard life and property.
Executive Director of RDI, Philip Jakpor said: “Maiduguri may just be the starting point. We had warned several times that the lacklustre approach of the federal and the state governments that have collected about N40 billion in ecological funds this year alone to address perennial floods, would lead to avoidable catastrophic incidents like this. Perhaps, the attention that has attended this case is only because Maiduguri, the state capital, is involved. If it had been in the remote communities, there would have been less alarm. This is completely damning for the government.”
Jakpor maintained that a dam does not just collapse in a day without notice.
“With the intense rains, a proactive management would have known that waters must be released gradually from the dam to avoid a breach. But, in this case, the waters had reached the crescendo before the management of the dam raised the alarm.”
The RDI boss pointed out that someone or some people must be held to account for the failure in acting to prevent the collapse of the dam and the monumental losses that the state has recorded and would incur in the days ahead.
He pointed out that Nigerians were yet to see effective and proactive coordination between the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) and their state counterparts in response to flooding incidents.
“Unfortunately what we only read is how the emergency management agencies struggle to share palliatives when such disasters would have been prevented in the first place.”
He urged other states of the federation to take a cue from the incident and take proactive measures to avoid similar happening, noting that in the Niger Delta region, for instance, monster floods were predicted to happen.