Atiku donates N50m to flood victims in Bayelsa

The PDP presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar, has donated N50 million to flood victims in Bayelsa State.

He made the donation when he visited Yenagoa, the state capital on Tuesday, to have a “personal experience of the devastation that victims of flooding across the country have been thrown into in the past weeks.”

This was contained in a statement from his media office.

Atiku described the scenes as horrendous and stressed the need for Nigeria to accord to climate change.

His visit comes days after the Labour Party’s presidential candidate, Peter Obi, announced the suspension of his campaign activities to visit flood victims across the country. He had called on other candidates to do same.

The National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) has said about 2.5 million persons are affected and over 603 persons killed by the flooding caused by the rains across the country.

Some affected states are Kogi, Benue, Ebonyi, Anambra, Bauchi, Gombe, Kano, Jigawa, Zamfara, Kebbi, Sokoto, Imo, Abia, Edo, Delta, Kogi, Niger, Plateau and parts of the Federal Capital Territory.

Atiku said his experience in Yenagoa is a story of human trauma under the spell of nature’s fury where public infrastructure like roads and power lines have been swept away in a flash, and facilities like hospitals and schools are destroyed and remain unavailable.

While he commiserated with the victims who have lost their lives, he called for help and said nothing is too big or too small to show empathy with them.

“…I wish to make a donation of N50 million to the victims in Bayelsa State,” he said.

“While we continue to advocate for charity in help of the victims, I want to reiterate my earlier call for the federal government to immediately launch an independent Flood Disaster Relief Fund that will provide succour to the victims of the floods. It is a national emergency relief fund, similar in scope to what was initiated during the COVID-19 pandemic, and to that end, I wish to call on my friends and associates in the corporate world and in private capacities to join in this cause.”

He also called on governments at all levels to activate measures to forestall the food shortages and further increment in the already high cost of food that are bound to arise from the loss of hundreds of thousands of hectares of farmlands.

He pleaded for the establishment of a temporary fund for farmers to ameliorate their losses and give them capital for next year’s planting season.

The federal government was advised to consider increased releases of grains from the Strategic Food Reserves and review the import policies to allow for the interim importation of food to make up for shortfalls in food production.

“And to forestall the recurrences of such devastating levels of flooding, the government must build the critical infrastructure required to contain excess water along the banks of the Rivers Niger and Benue,” he said.

If elected as president in the presidential elections next year, Atiku added, he will commit to completing the Dasin-Hausa Dam in Adamawa State to manage the release of excess water from the Lagdo Dam in Cameroon. And work with state governments like Bayelsa to build the required flood management infrastructure such as levees and dykes in key locations in the Niger and Benue Basins.

“My government, if given the opportunity, will retool our disaster awareness apparatus, such as the Nigerian Meteorological Agency (NIMET) and the Nigerian Hydrological Services Agency (NHSA), to better forecast disasters and give the warning signals required to activate our national emergency response protocols.”

This retooling, he explained, will also include the reform of the Nigerian Emergency Management Authority (NEMA) to ensure that it anticipates and responds to disasters such as this, more efficiently than it did, in the current situation.