The sudden floods in the center-north of Nigeria last week killed more than 200 people, the humanitarian commissioner of the state of Niger said Tuesday, while hundreds more remain missing and fear dead.
The city of Mokwa was beaten with the worst sudden flood in living memory on Thursday of the night rains, with more than 250 houses destroyed and stripes of the city annihilated in a single morning.
The announcement occurs after several days of the official toll in around 150, even when residents sometimes were missing more than a dozen members in a single family.
“We have more than 200 … corpses,” said Ahmad Suleiman to the Nigerian station Canales televisionAdd: “No one can tell him the number of victims in the state of Niger at this time because until now, we are still looking for some bodies.”
“We are still looking for more,” he added. But, he said, “sincerely speaking, we can’t determine.”
Given the number of people who are still there almost a week later, the one morning of floods in Mokwa could be worse than all 2024 combined, which saw 321 flood deaths throughout the country.
Climate change has made climate changes in Nigeria more extreme, but Mokwa’s residents said human factors were also at stake.
The water had been accumulating for days behind an abandoned railway that runs along the edge of the city, residents said. AFP.
The waters of the floods generally pass through a pair of sewers in the mounds and ran into a narrow channel. But the rubble had blocked the sewers, forcing water to accumulate behind the clay walls they finally yielded.
Floods in Nigeria are often exacerbated by inappropriate drainage, the construction of houses on river tracks and the discharge of drains and water channels.
Volunteers and disaster response equipment have recovered bodies at almost 10 kilometers (six miles) away after they were dragged to the Niger River.
Days before the disaster hit Mokwa, the Nigeria weather agency had warned about possible sudden floods in 15 of the 36 states of Nigeria, including Niger’s state, between Wednesday and Friday.
When AFP The reporters visited the city earlier this week, a powerful stench filled the air, which according to residents came from decomposition bodies trapped under the rubble.
The government said it has delivered help, but the locals have criticized what they say is a mediocre response, with multiple families that say AFP They had not received anything.
