A whirring machine churns out prints at the Royalink Printing Press in Ughelli South Local Government Areas of Delta State while owner Jude Anaborhi supervises. The copies are perfect, but business activities have struggled lately following threatening flood activities.
Flooding is not unusual in Nigeria’s massive, population-dense cities. But this year’s floods are reportedly the country’s worst in a decade. They’ve killed more than 600 people, displaced 1.4 million residents and destroyed 89,348 houses and 70,566 hectares of farmland and crops.
“Businesses are slow for me and my colleagues; people just want to survive first before thinking of printing anything,” Anaborhi, 66, said.
For Blessing Martins, a mother of four, the story is the same.
Every morning, Martins rises before dawn to prepare a cooler of rice and a large pot of beans, as well as yams and an assortment of other staple foods to reheat and sell to customers from a roadside table in a popular market in Nigeria’s southeastern state of Anambra.
Before the flood incident, she would clear a daily profit ranging from roughly N8,000 to N12,000, she said. But this last quarter, she’s fallen deeper and deeper into the red, with a monthly deficit of at least N5,000.
“Since the flood incident, making profit requires a miracle,” Martins said.
Martins’s belt-tightening fate and the situation of thousands hit by flood waters in at least 27 out of the 36 states has turned the spotlight on the country’s ecological fund.
The fund is a first-line response fund established to provide handy resources for the amelioration of environmental problems such as soil erosion, flood, drought, general environmental pollution, storms, tornadoes, bushfire, and earthquakes.
Data gleaned from the monthly Federation Account Allocation Committee reports showed that between March 2021 and July 2022, Nigeria set aside a total of N52.33 billion for the derivation and ecological fund account for the 36 states in the country.
A breakdown of the disbursement shows that N30.6 billion was shared with the state governments in 2021 and N21.84 billion in the first seven months of 2022.
Experts say the implementation of the ecological fund has not made the required impact on flood crisis that has displaced more than 1.3 million people across 33 states.
“Nigeria’s food system is completely in disarray. The ongoing flooding has added to the problems of the food system, thus reducing food availability,” said Kabiru Ibrahim, national president of the All Farmers Association of Nigeria (AFAN) in a response to questions.
“Hunger is going to further rise as we currently do not have anything in our reserves that would have served as a buffer to cushion the effect that would come from the shortfall,” Ibrahim noted.
He added that the flooding situation in the country has added to the problems of worsening insecurity, the impact of the Russia-Ukraine war, and surging costs of key inputs already rattling farmers.
This, according to him, is a serious problem for a nation where inflation is at a 17-year high, led by food inflation at 23.34 percent.
Governor Chukwuma Soludo noted that this had worsened our bad situation, especially for the people in his state.
He pointed out that about 30percent of the state is under threat, which increases the vulnerability of the people to economic crises.
Mai Farid, African Department, IMF, noted that the supply of agricultural products would drop, putting more pressure on prices.
He observed that the effect on the transportation networks would make food harder to transport across the country.
The Nigerian Meteorological Agency (NiMet) had earlier warned that at least 32 of 36 states of Nigeria, including Kaduna, Borno, Delta, and Bayelsa, were expected to experience a high risk of flooding this year.
Already, Benue, Jigawa, Nasarawa, Taraba, Kano, Bauchi, Niger, Anambra, Kogi, and Ebonyi have recorded flooding incidents within the last month.