Flood: Nasarawa wants more money to resettle victims

Governor Umaru Tanko Al-Makura and members of the State Executive Council (SEC), have already met with members of the 15-man committee headed by Dr. Mustapha Bello, as well as the management of the Nasarawa State Emergency Management Agency (NASEMA) to strategise on intervention coming into the state from the Presidential Committee headed by business mogul, Aliko Dangote, Daily Trust can report.
At the meeting, Daily Trust gathered it was agreed that the state government would prefer the Dangote committee sent the funds for the intervention, for the government to decide where and how to utilize it, than the committee moving to Nasarawa to execute the intervention itself.
But according to a source at the meeting, the governor was informed that the Dangote committee would not release funds to any of the states affected by the floods of last year, after reports of how many of the states either mismanaged the funds or embezzled them.
Nasarawa State government had said its own funds are still intact, almost a year after it was sent to Lafia, although the governor had said part of the funds – N50 million was already expended on providing relief to thousands of the victims last year.
Daily Trust recalls that the Dr. Bello-led committee had earlier in the year handed between N2,000 and N3,000 per family in few communities, sparking wide spread protests from the victims who insisted that the committee told them how they arrived at the decision that whole families needed such paltry sums for relief.
A total of 95,538 Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), about 8,000 from Guto alone, were recorded to have been displaced in about 200 communities of nine local government areas across the state. Over 2,000 hectares of cultivated farmland were also washed off in the floods which swamped thousands of houses.
The governor had said over N20 billion loss was recorded as a result of the disaster.
The state government had said it camped the displaced persons in four camps of Guto in Nasarawa, Tunga in Awe, Umaisha in Toto, and Rukubi in Doma, after about four months of devastating floods in 2012. Many of the communities hit are located about 15 kilometres of the Benue River bank, which swelled and overflowed the banks because of excess water released from the neighbouring Cameroons.
But the displaced persons abandoned the camps and returned to their houses at the flooded areas, just as  waters began to recede, and are, again, running away from same places because of current floods.