Nigeria Underwater · Part III — The National Flood Era, 2012 – 2024

Where Part I (*Ogunpa*) and Part II (*Lagos's Persistent Flood*) were urban events on small watersheds, Part III is the national flood era — the period since 2012 in which the failure mode shifted from city drainage to upstream dam releases, river-basin overflow and the absence of a federal early-warning system that works. Three events define it: the 2012 nationwide floods, the 2022 floods, and the 2024 Alau Dam collapse at Maiduguri.

The 2012 floods were Nigeria's worst natural disaster of the post-civil-war era. Between July and October, sustained rainfall across the Niger and Benue basins, combined with controlled water releases from the Kainji and Jebba dams on the Niger and the Lagdo Dam in northern Cameroon (released on 17 September 2012 to relieve pressure on the Cameroonian reservoir), produced a flood crest that travelled the length of both rivers and inundated their floodplains simultaneously. The official toll, published by the National Emergency Management Agency in December 2012, was 363 dead, 2.1 million displaced, 597,000 houses destroyed, and damage of US$ 16.9 billion (about ₦2.6 trillion at the time) — the largest single-event economic loss in Nigerian history. Kogi, Anambra, Bayelsa, Delta and Rivers were the worst-hit; the entire town of Lokoja, sitting at the Niger–Benue confluence, was under water for three weeks; Onitsha lost the entire main market access road for five weeks; and the Federal Government created the Presidential Committee on Flood Relief and Rehabilitation (chaired by Aliko Dangote) which raised ₦11.3 billion in private donations and disbursed roughly half of it.

The Cameroon question entered the national vocabulary at this point. The Lagdo Dam, completed by the Chinese in 1982, was designed as a binational project: Cameroon was to build Lagdo and Nigeria was to build a compensating downstream Dasin Hausa Dam at Numan in Adamawa State to capture and regulate the Lagdo releases. Nigeria began site surveys for Dasin Hausa in 1982, allocated funds in 1986, 1994, 2003 and 2017, and has so far built — nothing. Every Lagdo release since 1982 has therefore propagated downstream as an uncontrolled flood pulse. The 2012 release was the worst because it coincided with peak Nigerian rainfall; the 2022 release (on 13 September 2022) was almost as bad, killing 662 people by the NEMA final count, displacing 1.4 million, destroying 332,000 hectares of farmland and pushing the 2022 food-inflation rate above 30 %. The 2022 event submerged the Bayelsa state capital Yenagoa for forty-two consecutive days; the Kogi East senatorial district was unreachable by road for six weeks; and the federal trunk road from Lokoja to Abuja was severed at three points simultaneously.

The Maiduguri flood of 9–11 September 2024 was the most concentrated. The Alau Dam on the Ngadda River, built in 1986 to supply Maiduguri's water and irrigate 4,000 hectares of farmland, had not been desilted in twenty years; its spillways were partially blocked by a 2019 Boko Haram-era debris field. After 412 mm of rain over seventy-two hours, the dam overtopped and a 1.2 km section of the embankment failed at about 4 am on 10 September. A wall of water entered eastern Maiduguri at the Custom Bridge, submerged the Shehu of Borno's palace, the State Government House, the University of Maiduguri Teaching Hospital, and the central prison (releasing 281 inmates including 7 high-profile Boko Haram suspects), and stood at three metres in parts of the city for four days. The official toll was about 150 dead and 400,000 displaced — roughly one in four residents of metropolitan Maiduguri — with the Sanda Kyarimi Park Zoo losing 80 % of its animals, including a crocodile that was eventually recovered in a flooded street eight days later.

The pattern across the three events is consistent and the reform agenda is well-known and stalled. First, the Nigerian Hydrological Services Agency (NIHSA) publishes an Annual Flood Outlook that has, since 2018, correctly identified the high-risk states for the season; the outlooks are not acted on because state-level disaster preparedness budgets are negligible (Kogi allocated ₦80 million to flood preparedness in 2022, against estimated damages of ₦150 billion). Second, the Dasin Hausa Dam has been on the federal capital budget every year since 2017 with zero kobo released. Third, the National Flood Insurance Scheme proposed by the Federal Ministry of Finance in 2013 has never been launched; private flood insurance is technically available but priced at premiums no Nigerian household can pay. Fourth, the River Basin Development Authorities (twelve of them, established 1976) are budgeted as agricultural-irrigation agencies, not flood-control authorities, and have no statutory flood-mitigation mandate. Fifth, as *No Right to Breathe* documents, the Constitutional s.20 instruction to 'safeguard … water … and land' is non-justiciable; no Nigerian flood victim has won a court order compelling the federal government to build Dasin Hausa, to dredge Alau, or even to share NIHSA forecasts with state emergency authorities.

The future flood projections are clear enough. The IPCC AR6 WGII Africa chapter (2022) projects that the Niger and Benue basins will see 15–25 % more peak monsoon rainfall by 2050 under RCP 4.5, and 30–40 % more under RCP 8.5. Cameroon has informed Nigeria, in writing, that the Lagdo Dam will require larger and more frequent precautionary releases from 2027 onward as upstream catchment yields increase. The Kogi–Benue confluence at Lokoja will, on current projections, flood every two years instead of every five. The Maiduguri–Diffa basin is on track for two more Alau-scale events before 2035. None of the federal preparedness measures recommended after 2012, 2022 or 2024 have been funded to completion. Nigeria knows what is coming; the country has, for half a century since Ogunpa, chosen not to prepare. *Nigeria Underwater* is the record of that choice.