The Minister of Water Resources, Suleiman Adamu, has blamed the Cameroonian government for failing to inform its Nigerian counterpart before it released water from its Lagdo Dam.
Nigeria has witnessed severe flooding across many states in recent times, prompting calls for the suspension of campaign activities for the 2023 general election.
Many persons have been reported killed and many roads, farmlands, and valuable properties have been washed away by the flood.
According to the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA), 603 persons were killed by flooding caused by heavy rainfall in the last two months.
The Federal Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development had already likened the flooding in Nigeria this year to the last major flooding in 2012, which killed 363 people and displaced 600,000.
Adamu re-echoed the MDAs’ assertion that the nation’s flooding challenge was caused majorly by rainfall, and not the Lagdo Dam.
He said that only Adamawa suffered the adverse effect of the release of water from the dam.
However, he said in Abuja on Wednesday that the Cameroonian government ought to have inform his ministry before proceeding with the release of the dam water.
“All these stories I’ve been seeing on social media, I just laugh because they are misleading.
“The contribution of the Lagdo Dam to flooding in this country is only one percent. Sometimes they release the water without notice and when they do that, it has an impact on communities downstream but it is not the main reason we have floods in this country — 80 percent of the floods in this country is water that we are blessed with from God from the sky.
“This year’s flood, I can assure you, we cannot blame it on Cameroon to be sincere. We’ll continue to have floods on the river Niger and Benue basins. We signed the MOU with the Cameroonian authorities but since then, every year, it is the Nigeria Hydrological Services Agency (NIHSA) that calls them ‘what is your level in Lagdo?’
“Even this one when he called them, I was communicating with the DG NIHSA, I said ‘what’s happening in Cameroon?’ He said he has been calling them and they said they have not released any water but they said they will inform us. Finally, they said they will inform us tomorrow, they didn’t inform us, they informed us 24 hours after they had released the water.
“They did the same thing two years ago; I wrote to the minister of foreign affairs and Nigeria had to write a protest letter to the Cameroonian authorities that they did not inform us.
“It was after our rains had gone down, suddenly we saw floods in Adamawa area and we were asking them. For two weeks they were denying that they had opened the reservoir. Of course, it didn’t go to the confluence, it was limited to the areas of Adamawa state and Taraba. Because like I said, the contribution to the flood by Lagdo Dam is not so high,” Adamu said.