One city wag said the Biblical-proportion flood that overcame whole sections of the city of Maiduguri last week was second in national impact only to the recent increase in fuel prices, but I did not agree. We are yet to have a final tally of the Maiduguri calamity, including the number of lives lost, the injuries suffered, the number of houses and property washed away, critical infrastructure destroyed, productive man-hours lost, the hunger and homelessness suffered, disease outbreaks that could follow, and the anguish suffered by parents separated from their children by the floods.
You get a certain measure of the calamity from videos of major highways turned to gushing rivers; women, children and the elderly wading through gushing waters, grabbing anything they could for support; University of Maiduguri Teaching Hospital’s priceless cancer therapy and diagnostic machines swimming in the currents; some youths sitting on the rooftops of their houses, only a meter or so above gushing waters; Shehu of Borno’s palace flooded; Vice President of the Federal Republic and the Governor of Borno State wading through waist-high water in order to reach the Shehu’s palace, their security aides forming a protective ring around them in case water tried to wash away the big men; claims, though disputed, that hundreds of convicts and awaiting trial persons escaped from the medium security prison, some of them allegedly Boko Haram chieftains.
The Navy, other security agencies and locals deployed canoes along the [former] streets in order to rescue trapped people. It reminded us of Noah’s Ark. All this calamity caused by the Alu dam, which either collapsed or the water gushed over it, according to contradictory accounts. The last time we had a calamitous flood of this proportions, sweeping away parts of a major city, was the Ogunpa flood disaster in Ibadan in August 1980. We saw television pictures at the time of President Shehu Shagari shedding tears at the riverside when he visited the scene. There was also comic politics to it; when a delegation of Ibadan Descendants Union paid a sympathy visit to Governor Bola Ige, he dressed them down, saying it took them long to come when the Sokoto man Shagari promptly arrived at the scene.
In between Ogunpa and Maiduguri, we had the River Niger flooding of parts of Lokoja and other riverside towns in 2012 and again in 2013. No doubt our town planners’ dedication to their duties leaves much to be desired. Maiduguri was probably a once in a generation calamity occasioned by an unforeseen dam collapse, but when I saw videos of whole town wards in Lokoja, with only the tips of their rooftops visible, I wondered why houses were allowed to be built in the valley of River Niger, the mightiest river in West Africa, in Lokoja, after it has travelled thousands of kilometers all the way from Fouta Djallon mountains and crashed into the mighty River Benue, itself having arrived all the way from the Cameroon highlands.
In between calamitous floods, in Nigeria we have also had terrible canoe accidents. One of them just occurred three days ago, at Gummi town in Zamfara State, where 40 farmers on their way to their farms were said to have drowned. This year’s rains have been exceptionally heavy; Gummi town suffered a mighty flood, which did not get the same attention as Maiduguri because it is not a state capital. Many canoe accidents occurred in recent years in Niger and Kebbi States, on the River Niger and its tributaries. In April last year, a boat sank with a film crew on River Niger in Anambra State, leading to the death of Nollywood actor Junior Pope and four others. Some years ago, we also had a sea surge in Lagos, and major roads on the island were washed away by seawater.
Not only in water, but calamities on dry land have also been our lot in Nigeria. One of the worst vehicle accidents occurred in 1986, when two luxurious buses travelling in opposite directions collided in Edo State, with the loss of some 80 lives. Although there is a whole agency in Nigeria set up in 1988 to combat road accidents, the combination of our roads, our Tokunbo vehicles, our heavy traffic including overloaded articulated trucks, our national habit of ferrying petrol, diesel, steel and cement by road, not to mention our drivers deprived of sleep and our brash young child drivers, all combine to make FRSC’s work nearly impossible. I got an idea of what happens on our roads one day in 2010 when I entered Abuja’s Jabi Motor Park at midnight, looking for diesel. I saw whole rows of commercial drivers sleeping on benches and on cardboard mats, densely packed together like sardines, with not even enough space to turn. They were waiting for dawn to load passengers, jump into their vehicles and hit the highways.
Plane crashes tend to get the most publicity, maybe because they are rarer and also because the most important citizens travel by air. Among the worst cases were the November 1996 ADC plane crash into Lagos lagoon in which Prof Claude Ake was among the victims; the October 2005 Bellview plane crash outside Lagos that killed many VIPs; December 2005 Sosoliso plane crash at Port Harcourt airport, with 60 students of Loyola Jesuit College among the victims; the September 2006 crash of a military plane in Benue State that killed ten Army Generals including Major General Nuhu Bamalli; the October 2006 plane crash in Abuja that claimed many lives including Sultan Muhammadu Maccido; Nigeria Airways plane crash at Enugu in 1983 that had Governor C.C. Onoh’s daughter on board; the 1992 Hercules plane crash at Ejigbo that consumed nearly 200 Army Majors returning to Jaji for a course; not to forget the January 22, 1973 Jordanian Airlines Boeing 707 place crash at Kano airport, which killed nearly 200 returning pilgrims, including my uncle. Also calamitous have been train accidents, probably the worst being the February 1970 Langalanga train disaster in present-day Nasarawa State which killed dozens of passengers. In his biography, Dr. Ahmadu Ali also told a story about how he only just escaped a train accident in Ibadan in the late 1950s.
In the 1980s, we used to have a lot of kerosene explosions in Nigeria. Housewives lighted kerosene stoves or kerosene lamps only to have them explode, because the kerosene got mixed with petrol. We have had much less of that in recent years, no doubt due to greater diligence by the authorities. We however have even more calamitous gas explosions, in houses and in sales depots. Despite many tragic explosions in the past, Nigerians cannot resist scooping free petrol from a fallen tanker, which sometimes explodes with fatalities and injuries. Not to mention people scooping fuel from a vandalized pipeline; the worst explosion was probably the one at Jesse, Delta State in October 1998 when nearly 1,000 people died.
Sometimes it was not our fault. In August 1986, an estimated 100,000 tons of carbon dioxide gas erupted from under Lake Nyos in Cameroon, killing 1,700 people in nearby villages, some of them in Nigeria. Whole herds of cattle grazing by the lakeside were also killed. After road accidents, fire is probably our most common calamity in Nigeria. Although the Federal, every state, many Local Governments and many public and private agencies have fire fighting agencies, fire still kills many Nigerians every year and destroys a lot of property. Fire in a petrol station is one of the worst; I witnessed one in Kaduna in 2003 and the flames in the sky looked like Doomsday.
Another common calamity in Nigeria is building collapse. Lagos, Port Harcourt and Abuja are the Ground Zeros of building collapse. Whenever it occurs, Nigerian Society of Engineers will be huffing and puffing, that professional engineers were not used, that substandard materials were used or, often, that the building’s owner violated building approvals and added a storey or two on top of the approved plan. I was participating in an Editorial Board meeting at Jabi, Abuja in 2008 when we heard what we at first thought was a plane crash. We soon learnt that a multistorey building collapsed not far away, with many fatalities.
Talking about disasters, there was the Ikeja armoury explosion in January 2002. Lots of people died, not from the explosion, but because they fled into the nearby lagoon and drowned. When Defence Minister General T.Y. Danjuma visited the scene, he said something memorable: “When you hear an explosion, you don’t run! Take cover!” The BBC report on the incident also expressed surprise that although this country has lots of rivers and lakes, too many Nigerians do not know how to swim, which is a major survival skill. [I was a good river swimmer in my primary school days, but have since lost the skill].
We once had relatively minor earth tremors in Ogun State in the 1980s, in southern Kaduna State and in Katampe area of Abuja about ten years ago, the latter attributed to mining activity and possibly the indiscriminate sinking of boreholes. We have had mines collapsing onto miners, especially in the olden days of Jos tin mining, Enugu coal mines and more recently, in illegal Zamfara gold mines. Other national calamities include disease epidemics. Malaria is the biggest killer, but it gets nowhere near the publicity that the great Cholera epidemic of 1970 got, not to mention the 2020 AD Covid pandemic. Animal disease epidemics were not left out, including rinderpest, Mad Cow, foot and mouth disease and bird flu. Man-made calamities resembling natural disasters have also bedeviled Nigeria, including insurgency, banditry, Sit At Home, anti-government riots, and communal clashes such as Kafanchan 1987, Tafawa Balewa 1991, Zangon Kataf 1992, Ife-Modakeke and Aguleri-Umuleri.
We still thank God that in Nigeria we have never had a typhoon, a hurricane, a Central Asia-style major earthquake, an Australia-style mudslide, a Pacific-rim style tsunami, or a Chernobyl-type nuclear reactor meltdown. I sympathise with the people of Maiduguri on this latest national disaster. I am not doing so only because my great grandfather immigrated out of Borno in the mid-19th century. Alau Dam was built 150 years after he left, so he didn’t have a premonition.
