Flood buries Anambra community
…'Government looks away as water wrecks havoc in Anambra'
You may probably have seen one of the videos from the community making the rounds on the social media. One of them shows a young girl cooking right on top of water outside her flooded compound.
On a makeshift open fire erected on some elevated platform. A little to her left is her kid sister, pounding something in a mortar, standing right there in the flood.
There are flashing images of people moving about in canoes etc. And the tendency is to dismiss the viral video as another stage-managed Nollywood drama.
But this is no make- believe. This is not even ‘Reality tv’. This is real life.
Welcome Ossomala community in the Ogbaru Local Government Area of Anambra State.
VIDEO 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFyiIiy9Qts
For the people, this has been their life since that major nationwide flood disaster of 2012, which even compelled the Federal government to set up a flood relief fund that drew in several billions of naira in donations.
Not a kobo of that money seems to have reached this community on the banks of the River Niger, less than 10 kilometres away from the bustling commercial town of Onitsha.
For about eight years now, the people have literally lived in water. At night, many of them sleep in the open, on the main road, which is one of the few elevated grounds in the community.
On this day, in October 2020, when businessman and philanthropist, Festus Mbisiogu, revisited the community, after an accidental visit two weeks earlier, the water level had gone down appreciably.
Many parts of the community can now be reached by rugged Hilux trucks. However, the marks of the previous high tides can still be seen on house and fence walls everywhere.
Mbisiogu says he never knew about the community before now, and never set out to visit. Rather, he had fortuitously chanced upon it as he and his driver were looking for a shortcut to bypass the traffic logjam on the Onitsha-Owerri Road.
They had lost their way in the process and found themselves in Ossomala and it’s environs – communities so gripped in the now ritualistic annual flooding that all one can see is a major health epidemic waiting to happen. Of course, the hunger epidemic is already there.
Yes, in what many may superstitiously see as the wrath of the river gods and goddesses, over 200,000 residents of communities in Ogbaru Local Government Area of Anambra State barely 10 kilometers from the bank of River Niger are facing imminent extermination if nothing urgent is done.
Says Mbisiogu, “They have lost their homesteads, farmland, dear ones, agricultural products etc following regular flood upsurge from the river since August this year.”
And nobody seems to be doing anything. They seem to have been abandoned by both State and federal governments.
Neither relief materials nor the promised dredging of the River Niger, which the Federal Government said would provide a more sustainable solution to the flooding, has seen the light of day.
Even now, that there appears to be an urgent need to relocate the people, until the flood levels go down; no government is offering any assistance. The people are left on their own.
These autonomous communities which are barely 10 minutes drive from Onitsha metropolis, even as the food baskets of the state and Nigeria in general are mainly located along the ever busy Atani – Ozubulu express road includes Aboh Atani, Ossomala, Umunankwo, Mbutu and Ogbakuba among others.
Incidentally, this council area has produced great men and women in the nation’s socioeconomic space, like late Chief Osita Osadebe, Senator Stella Oduah and Chief Sule Ugbema, among others.
According to the residents, it is only Senator Oduah, being the senator representing the senatorial zone, and Hon. Somotochukwu Udeze, who occasionally bring some palliatives, like food items, to them.
On the causes of the yearly upsurge, two residents, Chief Onyekwere Nwadialo and Mrs. Nkiru Nwafili, insist, it is the alleged insensitivity of the Federal Government of Nigeria in dredging River Niger.
Mbisiogu, an indigene of Imo State, who said he came upon Ossomala by providence, said he has not been able to get his mind of what he saw on that first visit. This compelled him to take a journalist and a makeshift cameraman with him to visit the community again and try to bring their plight to the attention of bitg the Federal government and the Willie Obiano government in Anambra State.
VIDEO 2: https://studio.youtube.com/video/oSim5EUvJJg
“The situation is so pathetic seeing hundreds of innocent children being unduely exposed to unfriendly weather as their families now live on road side, cook on the road sides, sleep on the road and paddles canoes to enter their water logged compounds”, Mbisiogu laments, adding: “On getting to Owerri, my conscience continued to prick me on the level of sufferings the people were being subjected to, especially the children and women. As if God wants me to do something this morning (Tuesday) I received a heart touching video of the area in one of the WhatsApp’s group I belong. Again, I was psychologically restless, prompting me to abandoned all my activities today and arranged for journalists for on-the-spot analysis.
“My prayer is: if Federal Government can rescue these people to avert imminent epidermics. There’s urgent need to relocate and rehabilitate these people. Honestly, it will be a national mockery if any foreign media gets access to any of these communities and expose what they have been subjected to for years in a country priding herself as the giant of Africa”.
