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The
floods, which have built since early summer, have hit 27 of
Nigeria's 36 states and impacted around 1.4 million people, the
ministries for humanitarian affairs and for disaster management
also said.
"The scale of the disaster ...is colossal," Mustapha Habib
Ahmed, director general of the National Emergency Management
Agency, added in a statement.
On Thursday, drone footage in Lokoja, which sits in the
north-central Kogi state at the confluence of the Niger and
Benue rivers and has suffered weeks of flooding, showed dozens
of submerged homes and businesses.
"I have never seen such a thing," local resident Khalid Yahaya
Othman told Reuters as he looked at his submerged fuel tanks and
nearby waterlogged streets.
"When this water was coming, we never envisaged that it will
come and over cover the tank," he said
State oil company NNPC blamed the floods, which blocked a key
road out of Lokoja, for a fuel shortage in the capital, Abuja.
Federal Road Safety official Koton Karfe said the floods had
impeded traffic for at least two weeks.
(Reporting By Abraham Achirga in Lokoja and Libby George in
Lagos; writing by Libby George, editing by John Stonestreet)
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