LAGOS: Two major rivers have flooded across central Nigeria displacing tens of thousands of people, the Red Cross told AFP.
Rescue workers in Kogi State have been helping residents move away from the confluence of the Niger and Benue rivers to displacement camps or nearby villages.
Umar Y Mahmud, the Red Cross disaster management officer in Kogi, said Friday there were more than 60,000 people displaced and about 60,000 hectares (150,000 acres) of land under water.
“The situation is very bad now as the Niger river is increasing,” Mahmud said.
Kogi state’s information commissioner Kingsley Femi Fanwo said displacement camps were becoming “overwhelmed” and estimated that more than one million people could be in the affected areas.
The floods have been mounting for the past month, hitting densely populated areas, including parts of the state capital Lokoja.
In Ibaji district, more than three-quarters of the land has been inundated, Fanwo said.
Nigeria often sees floods during the May-to-November rainy season but there are fears this year’s could be worse than 2022 when more than 500 people died. No deaths have been reported this time.
Floods in Maiduguri, capital of the northeastern state of Borno, in September, left at least 37 dead.
Officials and residents often blame flood damage on climate change as well as poor planning, construction along riverbanks, and the release of water from dams

Tokyo: Israel’s ambassador to Japan criticized on Sunday a leader of Nihon Hidankyo, the atomic bomb survivors’ group awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, for comparing their experiences to the children of Gaza.
Gilad Cohen congratulated Nihon Hidankyo for winning this year’s prize but said in a post on social media platform X on Sunday the comparison drawn by the group’s co-chair Toshiyuki Mimaki “is outrageous and baseless.”
“Gaza is ruled by Hamas, a murderous terrorist organization committing a double war crime: targeting Israeli civilians, including women and children, while using its own people as human shields,” Cohen said.
“Such comparisons distort history and dishonor the victims” of the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel that triggered the war in Gaza, Cohen said.
Mimaki said after the prize was announced on Friday that the plight of children in Gaza was similar to what Japan faced at the end of World War II.
“In Gaza, bleeding children are being held (by their parents). It’s like in Japan 80 years ago,” Mimaki said.
A representative for the Hiroshima chapter of Nihon Hidankyo could not be reached for comment about Cohen’s post.
Around 140,000 people were killed when the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and 74,000 more were killed in Nagasaki three days later.
Survivors of the blasts later formed Nihon Hidankyo to tell the stories of those atomic bombings and to press for a world without nuclear weapons.
Nagasaki decided not to invite Cohen to mark this year’s 79th anniversary of the bombing, citing security reasons to avoid possible protests.
That decision prompted the ambassadors of the United States, Britain and the European Union, among others, to skip the ceremony and send lower-level officials instead.
The Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, resulted in the deaths of 1,206 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza says 42,175 people, a majority of them civilians, have been killed since Israel’s military campaign began there. The United Nations acknowledges these figures to be reliable.
hih/pbt