In a few words of caution and as a follow-up to Aligbe’s notable writings in this column, I must refer to a chapter in my last book “How Little We Are” that was published in this column some four years ago with the title, “Climate Change, no longer a debate for a distant nation.”
In 2019, a United Nations expert cautioned that climate change “threatens to undo the last 50 years” of development, global health and poverty reduction. The UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, had said, “Even if current targets are met, tens of millions will be impoverished, leading to widespread displacement and hunger.”
He added that climate change could push more than 120 million more people into poverty by 2030 and will have the most severe impact on developing countries, regions and the places where poor people live and work.
However, in line with the ECOWAS protocol on free movement, which stipulates the right of ECOWAS citizens to enter, reside and establish economic activities in the territory of other member states, Nigeria, being the big brother of the continent, saw its population grow from 60 million people without proper documentation and statistics of our population growth.
It is nice to be able to harbour countries that have been affected by the phenomenon of climate change that brought about desertification, which in turn damaged the grazing fields, greenery for farming and water bodies throughout the fringes of the Sahara. It is also nice to be able to harbour migration from neighbouring countries, but we have to be mindful of the fact that, if Nigeria should go down as a result of uncontrolled migration, many of these neighbouring countries will go down as well.
As a continuation of last week’s article on “Climate Change and Weather: The Nigerian Experience,” I have added below another of the many climate change consequences ravaging Nigeria as a nation.
Intense rainfalls
Intense heat produces increased evaporation of water bodies. The vapours would rise into the air where they coalesce to form clouds. With favourable wind patterns and the right pressure drops, tropical storms, cyclones or hurricanes would form. Since what goes up must come down, the hitherto water vapours come down as rain and, depending on the size of the lode and wind speed, we may end up with a deluge, a cyclone or a hurricane lasting for days on end.
The storms through ground saturation or high winds may topple trees, take out roofs or wash away houses with poor foundations. Landslides or flash floods may occur. Low-lying areas may be flooded and coastlines eroded. In the past two decades, Nigeria has had flooding and property damage and deaths in one coastal town or another almost on a yearly basis. In 2012, many villages along the banks of the River Niger were inundated or washed away with what we thought was a thousand-year flood. Fast-forward to 2022 and the same areas were again hit by intense flooding. In both cases, lives were lost, farmlands were destroyed, houses were washed out and roads and railroads were buried, eroded or buckled. This time, the catastrophe was blamed on Cameroon for releasing excess water from cresting reservoirs. Well, that is exactly what they needed to do to save their own dams from breaking up.
Spillways are safety features designed and built into dams to take excess water (when the water rises above a predetermined level of the dam) away from the reservoir. The spillways empty into the river channel downstream. The problem here is that Nigeria had failed to dredge the River Niger for years. If you travel along the banks of the River Niger today, you will see huge sandbars in the middle of the river channel. Some of these are so huge that they have become islands, inhabited. The sand materials that form these sandbars were eroded from upstream by the river and its tributaries. Now, as the sandbars form, the river meanders to divert its course, more erosion happens, sandbars increase in size, and the river depth gets shallower. So, when more water comes from upstream, either as rain or water released from inundated reservoirs, the river will subsequently overflow its banks. Hence the flooding of 2012 and 2022. If Rivers Niger and Benue are not dredged, all the states along their banks will continue to have catastrophic flooding.
I have always been worried about the hurricanes that develop in the Atlantic Ocean that up until now batter the Caribbean and the eastern part of North America, sparing the West African coast and us. But I worry about where we will be if the hurricane’s direction is reversed. A few years ago, a friend of mine drew my attention to the fact that he has noticed that whenever a hurricane event occurs in eastern North America, a tropical storm takes place in Nigeria or the West African coastline. I began to also notice this myself and pondered if our meteorological services and institutions are taking note of these occurrences. Recently though, the concept of ‘atmospheric rivers’ being responsible for storms of biblical proportions is gaining ground with the discovery that these ‘atmospheric rivers’ can stretch for thousands of kilometres long and many hundreds of kilometres wide. These bands of rivers in the sky are definitely consequences of climate change and their detection has been made possible with advances in satellite technology. It is not difficult to understand why similar adverse weather events can occur across countries and continents.
What to do
Again, we must take seriously the adequate management of our inland waterways. This can easily be done. The sand washed into the river basins and the banks is economically viable. Properly dredged rivers can provide water transport that will ease the pressure on our roads. So, dredging can be an economically viable business. The Mississippi River in USA runs from the north to the south, emptying into the Gulf of Mexico. It is dredged daily. Mid-sized ocean-going vessels ferry goods and services all along the Mississippi. We can do the same here with the River Niger and River Benue up to the points where the dams are located. Grand Hotel in Asaba years ago used to offer boat sightseeing services to Lokoja for their guests. They cannot do that anymore because the depth is now too narrow to accommodate the boat’s draft.
We need to reconstruct drainage systems in most of our cities. If we must have open drains, the governments must undertake to keep them clean and unclogged. We need to learn to dispose of our trash properly. That too is the function of the government and the citizens. On a larger scale, governments must begin to build coastal defenses to protect lands, the people and their properties.
It is worth noting that the consequences of climate change include food insecurity, reduced crop yields, increased migration and dramatic damage to coastal communities. Given this, I had previously written about the origins of the herdsmen’s crisis in Nigeria, and my focus then was to establish this link between the crisis and climate change. That wouldn’t be my first time tackling the issue, and even proffering solutions in media writings and interviews with the hope that we take up the climate change discussions seriously and adhere to these precautions.
•Written by Newton Jibunoh
Contributed by Aligbe Onuorah