Mokwa: Divine Events, Human Failings

We must begin by saying our prayers to all the victims of the flood in Mokwa town in my home state of Niger on Thursday the week before last. May Allah’s mercies be with those who lost their lives and with those they left behind to recover from the devastating effects of the flood. May we never witness such disasters again.

We must also agree with former military President, General Ibrahim Babangida who said days later that “what happened in Mokwa is unfortunate, but it is ordained by Allah. It is beyond our powers, and this is why we should all continue to pray for the souls of the deceased”. No one should be contesting this.

But even in our firm agreement with the divine cause of all things and all circumstances, good or bad, we must still be clear-eyed about how human failings, both institutional and individual, make natural tragedies worse. It is true that the flood in Mokwa, as with those before it, was divinely ordained. But it is also true that it reflects, yet again, the failure of government. And the two statements are not at all in contradiction with each other.

First, we must all realise that this was no ordinary tragedy. Over 200 people reportedly died in the floods, with a further 500 plus still missing and unaccounted for, more than 10 days after the unfortunate incident. And now that the search and rescue efforts of the authorities, which never really got much underway, have been officially ended, perhaps we can go with the figure by the BBC that over 700 people perished in this endlessly tragic cycle of flooding and dying in Nigeria.

Moreover, beyond the death toll, over 3,000 people have been reportedly displaced, including more than 1,600 children and 383 lactating mothers, according to UNICEF. And in a town only the size of Mokwa, the floods destroyed more than 265 houses, three bridges and impacted about 503 households overall.

While no one prays for natural disasters, particularly those influenced by the vagaries of climate-change such as this, we must still accept that governments and people have a responsibility for mitigating them when they happen, and better still to prevent them, or at least try. In the case of Mokwa, as in the previous annual cases of flood Nigeria has had across many states in the past 15 years, someone somewhere had the responsibility of preventing it. Someone somewhere has a job description of mitigating the effects and providing immediate relief. Certainly, someone has the responsibility of conducting serious search and rescue to save lives. All of them failed, again.

The government has a responsibility to prevent this kind of disasters, in at least three important ways: the government does one well but fails woefully in the other two. The Nigeria Hydrological Services Agency (NIHSA) and its cousin, the Nigerian Meteorological Agency (NiMet) are both quite adept at issuing warnings against dangerous weather conditions each year. In its 2025 Annual Flood Outlook report, for example, the NIHSA warned that 1,249 communities in 30 states plus the FCT are at varying degrees of flooding this year.

No doubt, such warnings are a preventive measure, but that is about the only thing the government does well. Warnings are not the only preventive measures against environmental disasters, however. In Nigeria, a recurring factor in the now annual cycle of floods, deaths and displacements is the penchant by citizens to encroach into and build their homes in areas clearly designated as flood plains. This was a major factor in Mokwa, as in the many cases of floods before it. People simply build wherever they can, without regards to any environmental risks or laws. And when disasters of this kind happen all eyes fall on the government.

That is neither fair to the government nor to ourselves. As a citizenry, Nigerians must know that we cannot be repeatedly doing the same things over and over again and expect different outcomes, certainly not where our lives, limbs and livelihoods are at stake. Still, it is wholly the responsibility of the government to enforce its own regulations, including environmental laws. Niger state, like all the other states, has town planning and urban development agencies who have the responsibility to ensure all new buildings are approved according to the rules.

The Niger state government also has the direct responsibility, as does all other states, to evacuate and resettle residents whose ancestral homes and lands happen upon flood plains. Unfortunately, the state government has lacked the will, or the ability, or both, to evacuate and resettle people in affected Mokwa districts, while its urban development departments—deeply infested with corruption—have been unable to enforce environmental laws over the years. In this sense, the floods in Mokwa were directly a failure of governance at the state level.

That is not all. Even with the best of preventive measures such as enforcing building regulations and evacuating and resettling people from flood-prone areas, natural disasters can still happen. And when they do, it is still the responsibility of the government to provide swift emergency response, rescue and relief. In Nigeria, this responsibility falls on both the federal and the state governments. Indeed, the federal government and the 36 state governments share the accruals from the Ecological Fund annually, although we know that Fund exists mainly as a slush fund for politicians, not for mitigating disasters or providing relief.

In Mokwa, both the federal National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) and the Niger State Emergency Management Agency (NSEMA) failed woefully to provide any meaningful response, rescue or relief. UNICEF, a UN agency, probably did much better in providing relief in terms of prompt action and reach than NEMA and NSEMA put together. Many residents and community leaders disputed claims by both agencies that they were on the ground with relief services for victims. The very fact that the search and rescue operations were officially concluded by June 1, is itself a shameful indictment. You have to keep searching for much longer, if just to demonstrate to the presumed dead and the living that life matters.

Unfortunately, government in Nigeria has no philosophical moorings about human life, and therefore, lacks any direction about what must be done in such most serious of circumstances. Nigerian government, still stuck to its colonial roots, lacks any sort of respect for Nigerian life, the very thing any Nigerian government is formed to protect the most. Our government officials and institutions generally do not understand the seriousness of such matters—Nigerian life is everything—and continues to demonstrate this lack of understanding to the world, even 65 years after so-called independence.

Thus, is one sense that is what Mokwa revealed yet again, that Nigerian government authorities have so little regard for the lives of Nigerians they can just summarily presume over 500 people dead without making the most concerted of efforts to find even just one person who might still be alive.

This brings us to the most important human failings of all, the Governor’s. I still do not have all the facts, but from what I know, it looks like Governor Mohammed Bago had all been set, but not yet made his trip for Hajj when the floods occurred on the night of Wednesday 28 May into the early hours of Thursday, 29th. That is, Governor Bago was still in Nigeria when the flood happened. He sent his deputy for on-the-spot assessment, and went on Hajj anyways.

I am only a newspaper columnist, not a religious leader. But I have a full understanding of how seriously Islam takes leadership from a purely Islamic point of view from the accounts of early Muslim leaders I have read. I am confident that from that Islamic point of view, the correct thing for the Governor would have been to cancel his Hajj and stay to show solidarity with the victims, or return if he had already landed in Saudi Arabia. That would be leading by Islamic values, but also leading by democratic tenets on which he was elected. Governor Bago is well praised to have done well in other areas of government, but on this occasion, he failed to provide true leadership. There is no other way to put it honestly.

Mokwa: Divine events, human failings – Daily Trust