When the footage of the devastating floods in Mokwa hit my eyes, I didn’t know if to sink into grief or meditation, or rage in futility or take solace in my verses. I was hit with the sort of trepidation that shut my lips into practiced prayer and deflated silence.
However, I reckon this thing didn’t start with rain. It started with silence. A silence that had run through urban planning departments for decades. A silence that deepened each time we built homes before roads, filled wetlands for markets, and saw trees as obstacles instead of buffers. And so, when the floodwaters peeled the earth naked and swallowed Mokwa, it wasn’t a surprise. It was a scheduled disaster finally showing up on time.
In a matter of hours, more than 200 lives were lost. Over 3,000 people were displaced. Roads vanished. Farms disappeared. Graveyards washed open. A town once quiet and self-sustaining is now a soggy memory of what should have been protected. Yet, the water did not just take…it undressed us. It revealed how our cities, towns, and villages were never built to survive the world we live in.
The floods weren’t just an act of God; they were a consequence of deliberate human neglect. And now, over lives have been lost. I don’t want to talk about disaster fatigue or donor rounds. I want to talk about how, we keep doing the same things and act surprised when the same things happen.
Mokwa wasn’t just drowned by water. It was choked by failure–of leadership, of planning, of care. It’s what happens when we confuse sweet speeches for smart solutions and when environmental warnings feel like background noise to louder political headlines.
Beyond Mokwa, it’s about Maiduguri last year. Borno, Bauchi, Sokoto, Zamfara, Katsina, Benue, Gombe, Yobe –state after state, storm after storm. I wrote then that almost every Nigerian city is as flood-prone as Maiduguri. This year, Mokwa is just the beginning–and we haven’t even reached peak flood season.
What we have is a national pattern of building chaos. We cut trees, we build on flood plains, and then we wonder why the water refuses to stay where we hoped it would. There are no green areas to absorb excess rain, no wetlands to act as buffers, no real drainage systems, and no natural paths left for runoff. So, the water clears its own path. And that path often goes through people’s lives.
We need to stop pretending this is weather. It is design or the lack of it. Most of our cities are unplanned. Or worse, planned and ignored. We build first. Then argue later about access roads, drainages, or safety. We fill up swamps and wetlands, call it development, and forget to replace the natural systems we’ve erased. No trees. No grasslands. No buffers. When the skies open up, the soil can’t breathe. The water can’t sink. It can only run.
We are not just suffering from climate change. We are amplifying it. We are making it worse.
As residents reel from the losses trying to get their lives together, I hope the donations reaching Mokwa reach the actual victims of the disaster. This is not how sustainable countries are built. This is how history judges failing ones.
If we are serious, and I mean truly serious –about survival, then we need more than emergency tents and body counts. We need a total urban renewal programme. Not a project. A programme. One that sees drainage systems as national assets. One that prioritises green spaces, tree planting, wetlands restoration, and long-term zoning enforcement. One that gives power, funding, and responsibility to local governments and not just for disaster response but for disaster prevention.
We need to return to the basics:
- Drainage before development.
- Trees before rooftops.
- Wetlands protected, not paved.
- Roads designed with runoff in mind.
The SDGs are not distant ideals or about aesthetics. It’s about life and death.
Goal 11 (Sustainable Cities), Goal 13 (Climate Action), Goal 9 (Infrastructure), and Goal 1 (No Poverty)—all of them intersect on a flooded street in Mokwa. All of them failed together.
We can’t keep burying the poor with the excuses of the powerful. The rich don’t drown in floodplains. The poor do. The poor don’t get boats and helicopters. They get the blame.
And so, the question now is this: Will we plan for the next storm, or will we once again wait until the water comes knocking?
Because make no mistake, the flood is coming. May be not just to Mokwa, but to every Nigerian city that looks like it. And that’s most of them.
I hope Mokwa becomes a warning. Let it be a mirror. Let it be the last time we act shocked by a storm we created.
