Too much cho cho cho
Nigeria’s annual floods are likely to hit again
Happy Friday, Big Brains. If you don’t do anything else this weekend, please go out with your friends to a place where you can scream your head out and escape capitalism till it comes back on Monday with revenge.
-Margaret
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Reading time ~ 5 mins
Let’s get into today’s edition:
Nigeria’s annual floods are likely to hit again
US’ newest immigration rule might hurt your japa plans
The Big Deal
Nigeria’s annual floods are likely to hit again
If you say Nigeria is committed to being caught unfresh, you wouldn’t even be wrong because that’s what it looks like at this point. After the rains experienced in parts of the country over the past few days (sorry if it’s still hot as hell where you are), the federal government has released a flood outlook that has left us with questions.
At a public presentation of the 2025 Annual Flood Outlook (AFO) by the Nigeria Hydrological Services Agency (NIHSA) in Abuja on Thursday, April 10, the Minister of Water Resources and Sanitation, Joseph Utsev, revealed that 30 states, including the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), would likely experience heavy rains and flooding during the rainy season.
According to Ustav, the high-risk areas are Abia, Adamawa, Akwa Ibom, Anambra, Bauchi, Bayelsa, Benue, Borno, Cross-River, Delta, Ebonyi, Edo, Gombe, Imo, Jigawa, Kebbi, Kogi, Kwara, Lagos, Nasarawa, Niger, Ogun, Ondo, Osun, Oyo, Rivers, Sokoto, Taraba, Yobe, Zamfara and the Federal Capital Territory.
While 1,249 communities in 176 Local Government Areas (LGAs) across 30 states and the FCT have been categorised within the high-risk flood zones, 2,187 communities in 293 LGAs fall under the moderate flood risk zones, and Abia, Benue, Lagos, Bayelsa, Rivers, Jigawa, and some others have been tagged key risk areas.
If you’re wondering what the government intends to do about this threat, the Director General of NIHSA, Umar Mohammed, wants you to know that instead of doing general mappings, they’re taking a different approach this year by identifying specific communities where floods are most likely to happen.
In Mohammed’s words: “Our focus has expanded to assess sectoral impacts on health, education, agriculture, and infrastructure, offering more robust tools to policymakers and disaster risk managers,”
Why is this a big deal?
Let’s start with the fact that all we’re hearing is cho cho cho, the same kind that we hear almost every year, except this time; the Lamba will be broken down on a macro level to spotlight at-risk communities.
We hate to play Captain Obvious here, but Nigerians can hardly do anything with these forecasts that they keep giving out; what they need are tangible actions that’ll ensure the floods don’t destroy properties or claim lives as they have done in the past years.
For context, the tragic Maiduguri floods of 2024 are not the first Nigeria has seen. In 2012, heavy flooding in areas downstream of the Kainji, Shiroro, and Jebba, as well as some other dams, claimed 363 lives, injured 5,851, and displaced 3,871,530.
In 2017, about 4,000 homes were destroyed, while over 10,000 people were displaced in Benue State due to the overflow of the Benue River after days of heavy rains.
Nigeria, with a crazy addiction to being caught unfresh, did not do its homework after these floodings, so in 2022, it returned to be tagged what is now known as the country’s worst floods in decades. It killed over 600 people and displaced 1.3 million in various states across the country.
The government likes to heap the blame on nature but experts have poked holes in this claim, clarifying that the floods are both caused by climate change and human factors including poor drainage systems and obstruction of waterways due to poor town planning.
Over and over again, experts have come forward with tangible solutions that go beyond timely flood forecasts— solutions like dredging rivers to enable them to accommodate more water, paying more attention to town planning, fixing the drainage systems, and, more importantly, building more dams and maintaining existing ones. After the devastating Maiduguri floods of 2024, Connected Development (CODE), a Civil Society Organisation (CSO), pointed out that over 300 dams in Nigeria are “in dire need of maintenance”, but we haven’t seen the government taking this up. What we have seen instead is an allocation of ₦80 billion for the reconstruction of the collapsed Alau dam. While this is commendable (even if it’s not timely enough), we have to ask, “What about the other dams?”
NIHSA’s forecasts and its new community-level predictions are cool, but will concerned government agencies take actionable steps to act on these forecasts or sit on them as usual? So far, apart from the flag-off of the Alau dam, there hasn’t really been any action towards mitigating the floods since the last one. All we’ve seen is mostly cho cho cho.
We’re not the only ones hammering on actionable steps for flood prevention. Others, including the Director of Dams and Reservoirs Operations in the Federal Ministry of Water Resources, Ali Dala, have said similar things. In 2024, for instance, Dala said, “Nigeria currently lacks the necessary number of dams to effectively control flooding.” He also cited the US’ 92,000 dams and China’s 98,000 as exemplary amounts as opposed to Nigeria’s 408.
We’ll have to end this by asking you to demand tangible answers from your elected officials on how they plan to act on NIHSA’s forecasts to protect you against the 2025 flood. Wondering where to start? You can begin by talking about it on social media or finding their contacts here.
US’ newest immigration rules might hurt your japa plans
If you think the tariffs and countless Presidential orders were the last of Donald Trump’s tricks, you’re so wrong. The Trump administration has just landed with another banger that could cut short thousands of japa plans.
On Wednesday, April 9, the US government announced that it would immediately start screening social media accounts of immigrants and visa applicants for antisemitic activities.
The thing, though, is that Trump’s interpretation of the word is not the same as that of the world. Antisemitism, by definition, means prejudice, hostility, or hatred of Jews. By this definition, it’s a crime that should be frowned upon by anybody with half a brain and a conscience, except Trump’s meaning is quite different. The US President believes that pro-Palestinian individuals who call out Israel’s military onslaught in Palestine are antisemitic and supporters of Hamas and other rebel groups such as Hezbollah and the Houthi.
Trump, in his usual nature, has not attempted to hide his feelings towards pro-Palestine individuals in the US. Reuters reports that he has tried to stifle protests in support of Palestine, has revoked tons of visas, threatened federal universities in his country with funding because of pro-Palestinian protests, and is currently trying to deport foreign students over the same issue.
The just-announced social media screening, according to the US government, will affect foreign students, students linked with institutions guilty of antisemitism, and people applying for lawful permanent residence.
Ironically, Jewish groups fighting antisemitism, like Nexus Project and Bend The Arc, have reacted to the announcement, telling Trump that he’s doing too much. Nexus Project said, “Treating antisemitism as an imported problem does not fight antisemitism. Using politically malleable language like ‘terrorist sympathizer’ to go after immigrants does not fight antisemitism. Doing this while elevating antisemitism, as this administration is doing, does not fight antisemitism.”
Will Trump listen to the voice of reason? We might just have to wait and see. It’s all we can do at the moment anyway.
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