Floods Predicted, Disasters Not Prevented

Recently, the Nigeria Hydrological Services Agency issued National Flood Advisory NFA-2026-262. Its director general, Arch Umar Mohammed, signed it and released it to the public. The advisory was precise, grounded in river stage data, and named its geography without ambiguity: fifteen states, namely Imo, Cross River, Delta, Ebonyi, Benue, Anambra, Akwa Ibom, Edo, Enugu, Bayelsa, Kogi, Abia, Taraba, Rivers, and Lagos, face high riverine flood risk between 19 and 25 September 2026. More than 8,000 communities and 4,500 schools were identified as exposed. Across Ebonyi alone, 2,574 communities, 1,064 schools, 422 healthcare facilities, 480 markets, and 1,882 hectares of farmland lay in the flood path. In Cross River, 2,471 communities, 703 schools, 344 healthcare facilities, and 854 hectares of farmland were at risk. In Imo, 1,022 schools and 553 healthcare facilities were listed. The advisory did not hedge. It said: communities on floodplains should prepare to move to higher ground. It named nine specific river monitoring stations. It urged state governments to act without delay.

This is not an unusual document. It is, in fact, a document that repeats itself, with modest variation, every year. That is the first and most philosophically important thing to recognise about Nigeria’s flood crisis: it is not a crisis of prediction. It is a crisis of will.

NiHSA has issued Annual Flood Outlooks and weekly advisories with increasing precision for years. The community-level exposure data in this advisory, including the number of schools in Ebonyi, the hectares of farmland in Cross River, and the healthcare facilities in Imo, represents hydrological science functioning as it should. By any technical standard, Nigeria knows what is coming. It has known for years. It publishes what it knows. The gap is between the knowledge and the response.

The historical record is unsparing. In 2022, flooding killed more than 600 Nigerians, displaced 1.4 million, destroyed over 200,000 homes, and submerged more than 332,000 hectares of farmland. In 2024, the death toll exceeded 1,200, with over 1.2 million displaced across 31 states. In 2025, the Mokwa flood alone killed more than 500 people after water was released from the Jebba Hydroelectric Power Station with catastrophic downstream consequences. NEMA’s 2025 data showed that children were the most affected demographic, constituting the largest share of the 433,778 persons affected nationwide. Each of these events was preceded by flood advisories. Each advisory was precise. Each disaster happened anyway.

The pattern has a governing logic, and it was named with surgical directness in a notable April 2026 analysis: federal warnings are consistently issued; state governments consistently ignore them, delay evacuations, fail to dredge drains, fail to enforce building codes on floodplains, and then present claims for federal emergency funds after the damage is done. The architecture of this cycle, prediction followed by inaction, catastrophe, relief request, and repeat, is not a failure of information. It is a failure of accountability without consequence. State governments that treat annual flood seasons as annual surprises, despite annual advisories, face no institutional penalty for doing so. Emergency funds arrive. The displaced return, eventually, to the same floodplain. The following year’s advisory lists the same communities.

There is also a deeper structural question that no annual advisory can resolve on its own. A significant portion of Nigeria’s chronic flood vulnerability is not natural; it is engineered by policy neglect. Uncontrolled urban expansion onto floodplains, the absence of functional drainage master plans in most states, the failure to enforce riparian buffer zones, and the politically convenient refusal to resettle communities whose floodplain exposure is permanent rather than seasonal have all compounded what climate change and rainfall variability alone do not fully explain. The 2025 Mokwa flood, triggered by a dam release, is a specific illustration of a broader truth: in Nigeria, many floods are not merely weather events. They are governance events wearing weather’s clothing.

The educational dimension of this advisory deserves its own emphasis. The forecast identifies 4,500 schools at risk across fifteen states. When those schools flood, children lose learning days they cannot recover. In communities where schooling is already fragile, where attendance is seasonal, where teachers are few, and where examinations come once a year, a flood-induced school closure is not a minor disruption. It is a developmental setback that compounds across years and cohorts, invisible in the national aggregate but devastating in the individual life.

What is required is a structural response commensurate with a structural problem. NEMA and the relevant state emergency management agencies must publish, publicly and annually, their pre-positioned response capacity before peak flood season: tonnages of food, units of emergency shelter, water purification capacity, and transport logistics staged in the most exposed states. State governments in the fifteen listed states must demonstrate to their assemblies and to the public what evacuation plans exist, which communities are being offered relocation, and what drainage work has been completed since the last season. NEMA must be empowered and funded to enforce compliance rather than merely appeal for it.

A flood we predicted and refused to prevent is not a natural disaster. It is a policy failure dressed in meteorological language. Nigeria’s citizens in Ebonyi, in Benue, in Cross River, in Kogideserve the protection that their government’s own scientists have given it the tools to provide. The advisory has been issued. The question now is whether anyone is listening.