Suleiman Adamu, the minister of water resources, has stated that rainfall, not Cameroon’s Lagdo dam, causes 80 per cent of Nigeria’s floods.

“All these stories I’ve been seeing on social media, I just laugh because they are misleading,” Adamu stated in Abuja on Wednesday, October 19.

“The contribution of the Lagdo dam to flooding in this country is only one per cent. Sometimes they release the water without notice and when they do that, it has an impact on communities downstream but it is not the main reason we have floods in this country — 80 per cent of the floods in this country are water that we are blessed with from God from the sky.

This year’s flood, I can assure you, we cannot blame it on Cameroon to be sincere. We’ll continue to have floods on the river Niger and Benue basins. We signed the MOU with the Cameroonian authorities but since then, every year, it is the Nigeria Hydrological Services Agency (NIHSA) that calls them ‘what is your level in Lagdo?’

Even this one when he called them, I was communicating with the DG NIHSA, I said ‘what’s happening in Cameroon?’ He said he has been calling them and they said they have not released any water but they said they will inform us. Finally, they said they will inform us tomorrow, they didn’t inform us, they informed us 24 hours after they had released the water.

They did the same thing two years ago, I wrote to the minister of foreign affairs and Nigeria had to write a protest letter to the Cameroonian authorities that they did not inform us of.