DR. SYLVESTER IKHISEMOJIE FROM PUNCH
As the soil in this entire region continues to lose its cover, one of these events will happen sooner than later.
Until this morning, this column had a different heading and a different essay. However, the recent warning issued by the government of Ogun State to towns and communities bordering Lagos and in proximity to the Ogun River to expect flooding due to the release of water from the Oyan dam caused a change in the title. That warning became necessary because Lagos has seen the wildest population dynamics of any Nigerian city in this century. Worse than that is the fact that as newcomers to the Nigerian economic capital seek to find accommodation within the city’s heartland, older inhabitants have migrated to the suburbs and also the neighbouring Ogun State to find decent accommodation. The demographic changes are mind-boggling. Just 15 to 18 years ago, the journey from Lagos Island to Epe was mostly through some of the most densely forested landscapes in the country. In the years since then, there has been a huge migration to these areas with new industrial areas springing up, new housing estates and massive infrastructural development that has replaced vegetation with asphalt and concrete. As a result, the journey from Lagos to Epe is now one with an unbroken line of development till alpha beach, a mere 20-minute drive to Epe. Without adequate cover, rainfall and floods have done much damage to the homes and businesses in these areas largely because the expansion of those human habitats has been unregulated and haphazard. There will be a price to pay for this in human and material terms.
Worse still is that many of these changes in the landscape are being made possible by the availability of private capital. The estates, the industries and even some of the road networks are being laid by individuals and communities. The government concerns itself with the provision of some roads and occasionally, pipe-borne water. There is a poorly controlled manner of waste disposal and none at all for sewage treatment and disposal. In the end, the replacement of pristine forests with artificial constructions of various types is certain to change the ecosystem in those areas forever. Nor is this huge problem only affecting Lagos. Elsewhere in the country, but on a smaller scale, many state capitals and other centres of commercial activities like Aba, Onitsha and Nnewi have largely followed the example of Lagos. Calabar, Port-Harcourt, Makurdi and Lokoja have all seen similarly unregulated growth. The combined effect of these activities has seen many people falling ill from preventable diseases, water-borne diseases and many cases of drowning during heavy downpours. Flash flooding, landslides and collapsed bridges have followed suit. Violent storms have increasingly ripped off roofs, twisted roads and uprooted trees in many places and images from last year’s devastating floods in Kogi, Taraba, Bayelsa and on Lagos Mainland still haunt one. These events happened barely a year ago across the country and you can barely hear any government official at any level talking now about those events. That will be the position until disaster strikes again in a few more months.
Yet, no solutions have been found beyond the emergency clearing of drainage channels over which people continue to build houses in collaboration with corrupt government officials. As May looms, we are going again into a season of particularly violent rains and storms that are sure to make the conditions worse. Upstream and downstream of the rivers and coastal areas, farmlands, homes and businesses will be shut down for varying periods of time and there will be an attendant loss of human lives. Ogun State may have issued a warning now, but the people are unlikely to pay much attention as the struggles associated with creating a meaningful existence occupy the imagination of many people. The human cost is staggering. It is not a situation peculiar to Nigeria, though. Monsoon rains in India, Bangladesh and Pakistan have caused similar degrees of human suffering for several decades but it is undoubtedly getting worse as the oceans become warmer and the sea levels have risen. One remembers the epic efforts of the Indian Air Force dropping food parcels from helicopters for entire families trapped on the roofs of their homes because they were in communities that could not be reached by any other means of transportation. Many others were rescued using the same machines. In Nigeria, such people can expect no similar help. Concerned neighbours, who own canoes and boats, could offer their support but not the government, which most times wrings its hands in anguish as people perish and struggle against nature.
Such rainfall brings with it a dramatic increase in respiratory tract infections, intestinal infections such as typhoid fever and cholera and a spike in skin infections. Malaria, Dengue fever and Yellow fever often follow. At the peak of the problems, clinics and hospitals are often inundated with floodwaters or the access roads are made impassable by floods. Both domestic and farm animals are not spared as they equally face sickness and death by drowning. When they die in floodwaters in large numbers, the risk posed to the surviving human and animal population is incalculable. The threat of the outbreak of epidemics, the ruin caused to farmlands and the damage done to crops and food stores are such that entire populations can be threatened even with famine. Drought can lead to famine due to lack of water; in the same way famine can result from the excess of water. But while these tend to be seasonal damage and therefore recurrent, the permanent damage was done when the floodwaters wash off the vegetation and the topsoil, thereby making it impossible for the subsoil to absorb water. The denuded landscape may then take many decades to develop but the habitat loss is often profound. This is what we are seeing in the fringes of the Sahara desert and the Lake Chad basin as sand gradually replaces vegetation and becomes unable to sustain agriculture or human existence.
