Leadership (Abuja)
Teddy Nwanunobi
30 September 2007
Following the flood crises that swept across the African continent, especially the West African region, no fewer than 110 lives have been reported lost, including those of 64 Nigerians.
According to report late Thursday, one of West Africa's poorest nations, Burkina Faso, suffered 33 casualties in the floods that have made hundreds of thousands of Africans homeless across vast swathes of the continent.
The report also disclosed that administrative official report puts the Algerian casualty toll at 13 deaths.
Citing the Nigeria's Red Cross, the report said that the death toll covered a period since mid-July, while 22,000 people have been displaced in some 10 arid northern states of the most populous nation in Africa, as well as in the Lagos area, the huge economic capital in the southwest of the country.
The report also quoted the minister of social action and national solidarity in landlocked Burkina Faso as saying that, almost 7,500 homes had been destroyed in addition to the 33 people that had been killed over a similar period.
Further to the north, administrative officials in Algeria reported 13 deaths in violent storms and flash floods at the end of last week, which swamped parts of districts inland from the Mediterranean coast.
These figures come in the wake of a warning by aid agencies last Tuesday that neither they nor the governments in 22 African countries can cope with further rains and a humanitarian crisis that has affected at least 1.5 million people from one side of the continent to the other.
The floods of 2007 are the worst in 30 years, according to weather experts, and they have hit all the harder in a stretch of Africa across from Sudan, the most seriously affected nation in the east, to the sub-Saharan nations of the west where people, their crops, and the soil have been more accustomed to cycles of drought.
In Algeria alone, officials disclosed last Thursday that the cost of damage caused on just last Friday and Saturday, was estimated at 21 million Euros (30 million dollars).
"The rains have never been as heavy as this. Even now in most of the 10 states, the rains are still pouring down heavily, so we are really worried that more people might be displaced or affected," Red Cross spokesman, Patrick Bawa, was quoted as saying in Nigeria.
In many nations like Nigeria, according to the report, victims are living in makeshift camps or have managed to take refuge with relatives and friends, but the floods also mean a lack of fresh water and the risk of highly contagious water-borne diseases and malaria.Wealthy European Union countries and the United States have pledged millions of Euros and Dollars to assist, while the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation last Tuesday said that it will spend the full extent of its resources, totaling 12 million dollars.
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