Nigeria warns of a flood risk in 11 states as Cameroon lets water out of its dams

After recent heavy rain in West and Central Africa, Cameroon said it would start letting water out of one of its biggest dams. This caused Nigeria’s weather services agency to warn that 11 states could flood.

The warning comes as Nigeria is already dealing with serious floods in northeastern Borno state, where a dam burst after heavy rains. Heavy rains have also caused floods in Cameroon, Chad, Mali, and Niger, all of which are in the Sahel region of Africa, which doesn’t get much rain.

The Nigeria Hydrological Services Agency (NIHSA) said that Cameroon’s government told them on Tuesday that Lagdo dam’s water flows were being controlled.

The Benue River runs through Cameroon and into Nigeria. There are several dams on the river.

A spokesman for Cameroon’s ENEO utility, which runs the dam, told Reuters that the reservoirs had not been opened yet on Wednesday morning, so it was possible that the dam would flood.

The NIHSA said that the managers of the Lagdo dam would slowly let water out so that it wouldn’t flood the areas downstream of the dam.

NIHSA said that 11 states were at risk. These included Benue, Nasarawa, and Kogi in the central belt region, which grows food, and Bayelsa, Delta, and Rivers in the south, which grows oil.

It told the federal and state governments in Nigeria “to step up their vigilance and take the necessary precautions to lessen the effects of flooding that may happen due to the higher flow rates of our major rivers at this time.”

The worst floods in ten years happened in Nigeria in 2022, when Cameroon let water out of Lagdo dam and it flooded homes and farms. More than 600 people died.

At the time, experts said that the disaster was made worse by Nigeria’s failure to finish a dam that was meant to back up the Cameroonian one.

Nigeria, which has the most people in Africa, often floods, but some people say that bad infrastructure and lack of planning make the problem worse.