With the floods receding after months of ravaging many states of the federation, the grim picture of the havoc it had wreaked on the victims are gradually emerging. The floods had sacked many people from their communities, killed others as well as destroyed property and farmlands, whose values are yet to be estimated. Hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people are in camps, set up by various state governments, where they are adjusting to a new lifestyle foisted on them by inclement weather and manufactured disaster arising from overflowing dams.
In a country where record keeping is abysmally poor, the widely held belief is that people may never know what the floods had cost the nation. Attempts in the last few weeks to give the figure of what the floods had cost the nation in terms of deaths and those displaced have been enmeshed in a controversy as states hotly disputed the figures churned out by various agencies and groups.
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