/IPS ENVIRONMENT BULLETIN/ NIGERIA: Drought Expected to Follow Heavy Rains

By Toye Olori Reprint | | Print |

Toye Olori

LAGOS, May 31 1997 (IPS) - People armed with hoes and cutlasses dot some eight ha. of land on the University of Lagos campus, preparing it for planting under the downpours that are now an almost daily occurence in southern Nigeria.

“This is a shower of blessing,” says 56-year-old Mama Alloy, rainwater dripping from her face as she speaks to IPS. “We have already planted maize and cassava. We are now preparing the land for beans which do not need much water to grow well.”

“I make some money from this farm,” says Mama Alloy, who also plants vegetables. ‘It helps me take care of myself and two grandchildren who live with me. You know how difficult it is to care for oneself in this present-day Nigeria.”

The university allows farmers to plant on part of its land, apparently because this helps safeguard it from encroachment by private developers.

Each of the farmers has a plot measuring between 2,000 and 4,000 square metres. Most are retired workers who have taken to urban farming because their pensions are insufficient or civil servants like Sunday Abudu for whom it’s a way of supplementing their salaries.

“It is during this rainy period that one can till the ground, so I took my leave to work on the farm,” says 42-year-old Abudu. “I am used to working in the rain. It is a blessing.”

It’s a blessing, too, for the people in many towns in Nigeria who depend on smallholders such as Abudu and their rain-fed farms for some of the food that reaches their tables. The blessing may, however, be short-lived. Itis raining now, but according to meteorologists here, there is likely to be a drought this year.

Isyaku Mohammed, Assistant Director in charge of the Central Forecast Office at the Meteorological Department, explained that the predictor used to determine the weather situation in Nigeria has shown that the sea-surface temperature is abnormal, which will result in less rainfall.

“The predictor has also indicated that the rains in the southern states are going to be abnormal, just as the northern states may eventually record abnormal rainfall too,” Mohammed said, although he added that the prediction was not foolproof.

Earlier in the year, experts at the Meteorological Department here had forecast that, in 1997, Nigeria would receive less rain than expected which, in turn, would affect agricultural production. Since then, they have stuck by their prediction.

Another development appears to back up their forecast. Despite the rains, it has been extremely hot in Lagos in recent days.

But meteorologist Thaddeus Obidike believes there has not been any marked change in the temperature in the Lagos area over the years and he does not think the heat is due to global warming, as some have speculated.

“The position of the sun is responsible for the apparent excessive heat,” he says. “Although there is evidence of climate change due to global warming and the depletion of the ozone layer, the present phenomenon in Nigeria could not be attributed to those conditions for now.”

Obidike said the reason why Lagos was experiencing a hot spell was because the skies were cloudless and the sun’s rays were thus directly reaching the earth’s surface.

But he agreed with other experts that the rains could be less this year. Nigerians should guard against wasting water and also food because of the expected drop in rainfall and the effect this would have on harvests, he said.

The impending drought is expected to increase the volume of food imports — mainly rice from Asia and canned foods from various sources — which are said to run into millions of dollars although no statistics on imports are available here.

Nigerian Minister of Water Resources Aliyu Yelwa has also joined the chorus of warnings. Earlier this month he said the Sahelian states — the countries just south of Africa’s Sahara desert — should prepare for a possible drought in 1997 and another, more severe, one in the year 2003.

Yelwa explained that major droughts usually occur in the region every 10 years, and since the last one was in 1993, the next big one is due in 2003.

In the last two decades, drought and the advance of the desert have turned farmland into arid wastes, especially in the 1,320-km- wide belt that stretches across the north of the country, where 25 sq.kms of productive land is lost yearly. Nigeria’s total land area is 323,773 sq kms.

In parts of northern Nigeria, many people who used to be sedentary farmers have now become nomads, forced to move further south every two or three years when the desert catches up with their farms.

Some have ended up giving up agriculture and migrating to the cities where they try to make a living by doing menial jobs.