By Maryam Afolabi
MARYAM AFOLABI delves into the poignant narratives echoing through the region, where the intertwined challenges of flooding, damaged bridges, and erosions have become a daily ordeal for residents.
Over the last few years Kwara state, in North Central Nigeria, has been constantly hit by the perennial crisis mitigating from heavy rainfall, ranging from flooding, erosion, submerging of buildings, and even loss of lives and properties.
As the once serene landscapes transform into battlegrounds against nature’s wrath, the affected communities find themselves caught in a struggle for survival, desperately seeking solutions to mitigate the cascading impacts.
From the bustling markets to the serene rural hamlets, Kwara’s diverse communities share a common thread of adversity as floods inundate homes, leaving behind a trail of destruction.
According to the managing director of, the Hydroelectric Power Producing Areas Development Commission (HYPPADEC), Alhaji Abubakar Yelwa, in 2022 alone, seven persons lost their lives to devastating flood disasters in different parts of Kwara State.
The riverine communities in Patigi, Patigi local government area of the state were the worst hit by the disaster which has become an annual ritual.
A total of 1, 300 households and 2, 800 persons were affected in the flood disaster that also submerged large hectares of farmland and houses in Patigi.
Also in July 2023, the Minna operations of the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) alerted some of the residents in Kwara of an impending flood, Head of NEMA Minna operations office Hajia Zainab Saidu in a statement predicted flooding in Kwara state including Ilorin West and Ilorin East.
The warnings however are not enough to prevent the annual flooding this community experiences, and how it could have minimized their losses.
However Riverine areas in Kwara North and other flood-prone communities in Kwara State were not the only places hit by disaster from these heavy rainfalls.
It would be recalled that on Friday 30th of September, 2022, residents of Idi-Igba were area close to Harmony Estate, in Ilorin, woke up to a disaster that led to the loss of millions of properties after heavy rainfall, which lasted hours, flooded farmlands, residential buildings and caused damage to a section of the bridge linking the community.
A lot of fish farmers with ponds around that area suffered huge losses running to millions of naira, many of whom couldn’t recover to date. Apart from that the partial damage of the bridge, destabilized a lot of commuters that plying the road for weeks, as many had to turn back to take a longer route of Sango-Maraba-Ipata road.
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Meanwhile According to the Chairman of Kwara State Technical Committee (STC) of the Council for the Regulation of Engineering in Nigeria (COREN) Engr. Bashir Lawal; the failure on the bridge “is an Abutment Underscoring due to Seepage between the Abutment and the Retaining Walls” and not a collapse.
This means with adequate monitoring and rehabilitation, the damage to the bridge could have been entirely prevented, although it is worthy of note that it was repaired a few months after the incident.
Similarly, just a few hours after the incident of the Harmony bridge collapsed, tragedy struck again in the same vicinity on the 1st of October 2022 when the Kwara State Fire Service recovered three bodies from a river opposite Olusola Saraki Abattoir along Sobi Army Barracks Road, Ilorin.
The three corpses were later discovered to be that of a popular Islamic cleric in Kwara State, Sheikh Abdulganiyu Nuraini, popularly called Alfa Gani Aboto, and two of his students, Alfa Azeez Omoekun and Alfa Nurudeen.
According to the Kwara State Fire Service Head of Media and Publicity, Hassan Adekunle findings by the Fire Service revealed that the car carrying the victims fell into the river while the driver was struggling to navigate through the flood, adding that it suddenly got stuck while the flood pushed the car and its occupants into the river.
Meanwhile, this double tragedy happened in the same town of Ilorin just two years after five people similarly lost their lives when their vehicle was trapped near the Oko-Erin bridge during a heavy downpour. It was gathered that on arriving at the tip of the bridge, the passengers reportedly alighted from the vehicle one after the other to check if the car could drive through, but were suddenly submerged by the bridge which collapsed as a result of the force of the downpour
The Toyota car conveying the passengers was also ultimately submerged by the raging flood as it caved into the collapsed bridge. Meanwhile, the remains of one of the submerged passengers of the car were later found in a stream on Sunday morning at the Coca-Cola area of Ilorin.
This year 2023 has also witnessed incidents of collapsed bridges that left motorists and commuters stranded one of which was the bridge linking Shao and Kwara State University (KWASU) Malete Road in Moro Local Government of Kwara State which collapsed after a heavy rainfall on 18th of July this year.
All these tragedies may have been mitigated by flooding or rainfall but one cannot argue the fact that it is still man-made, because apart from the poor lifestyles of the residents living around these bridges which could have been a factor that resulted in flooding, one can’t help but blame the government and agencies that are responsible for repairing these bridges before they became death traps.
Similarly, different calls have been made by different communities and individuals in Kwara state to the government to come to their aid, to either construct new bridges or fix damaged culvert that has been destroyed by erosions. Some of these communities claim to have written a series of letters to the Ministry of Works and other officials all to no avail, before seeking the media.
One such case is that of one Mrs Elizabeth Adedeji a resident of the Olorunsogo community in the Ita Alamu area of Ilorin, who decided to seek the help of the media to appeal to the Kwara state government over the flooding and erosion of the community as a result of the diversion of a major drainage from Ganmo area to the community.
Mrs Adedeji a teacher and a widow, lamented that her house has been the worst hit in the community by the flooding since last year when the bypass was made. She also recounted how she has spent a huge amount of money and even took loans to repair the dilapidated culvert behind her house which has even collapsed her fence.
She added that despite her efforts the heavy rains that started this year have destroyed the little repair she was able to make on the drainage.
Therefore, as the dry season is approaching the government should seize the moment to embark on rigorous rehabilitation of all these major bridges, roads, and culverts, before the next rainy season, while also embarking on media campaigns that will re-awaken the people on the importance of environmental sanitation and dangers of blocked drainages.
