More than 200 inmates escape Nigerian prison in aftermath of flooding

More than 200 inmates escaped from a prison in north-east Nigeria in the aftermath of the worst flooding there in over two decades, authorities have announced.

There have been 37 deaths in Borno state after parts of its capital, Maiduguri, were overrun by water on 9 September following the collapse of a dam, according to the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA). As many as 200,000 others have been displaced. Residents of the city said some areas were still flooded on Monday when the president, Bola Tinubu, visited.

In a statement on Sunday, Abubakar Umar, a spokesperson for the Nigerian Correctional Service (NCS), said officials discovered that 281 inmates had escaped while being transferred to “a safe and secure facility” after their prison was flooded. Seven prisoners were recaptured while 274 others remain at large.

“The flood brought down the walls of the correctional facilities, including the medium-security custodial centre Maiduguri as well as the staff quarters in the city,” Abubakar said.

The NCS has begun a search for the missing prisoners in collaboration with other security agencies, he added.

According to local reports, reptiles, lions and other wildlife from the city’s Sanda Kyarimi Park zoo were washed into residential neighbourhoods by last week’s intense floods.

People displaced by the torrential rains are living in temporary shelters set up in six camps across the city. Maiduguri, the birthplace of a 15-year insurgency by the jihadist group Boko Haram, was once home to camps in some of the same locations for internally displaced persons (IDPs) but state authorities, keen to get people back to the rural areas, began closing them in the last three years. Relief materials have come from the federal government and the United Arab Emirates.

As many as 31.8 million Nigerians are already at risk of acute food insecurity, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Aid workers say things could get worse in the coming weeks, especially in northern Nigeria which is at the centre of the extreme weather crisis. There are also fears of potential cholera outbreak in the crowded camps.

“The area is now on high alert for outbreaks of diseases including cholera, malaria, and typhoid as well as animal and zoonotic diseases,” the FAO said in a statement.

In April, the Nigeria Hydrological Services Agency launched the 2024 Annual Flood Outlook, warning of floods across most of Nigeria’s 36 states. But the rains surpassed the annual average as the impact of climate change ramp up around the globe.

So far, 29 states have been affected. FAO representatives say 1.3m hectares (3.2m acres) of land nationwide was submerged as of 10 September. About half of that was cropland.

“The severity of this flood [in Maiduguri] has far exceeded our estimates,” said Kashim Shettima, the vice-president and former governor of the state, during his assessment visit.

The floods in Nigeria come as people in neighbouring Cameroon’s Far North region are reeling from a flood on 28 August that led to 3,700 houses collapsing after water retention dykes broke.

The Benue River, which runs through Cameroon and Nigeria, hosts the Lagdo dam in the nearby North region of Cameroon which, when opened, is a yearly source of flooding in Nigeria. Aid workers at the FAO say states such as Adamawa, next door to Borno, are “at imminent risk” due to an expected discharge from the dam.

Shettima said the government was “committed to finding lasting solutions to this recurring issue”. But aid workers say more needs to be done as available infrastructure is being overwhelmed by the situation.

Suwaiba Dankabo, the deputy director of Action Aid Nigeria, told a press conference in Abuja on Friday: “Road and transport networks have been destroyed, making it even harder to deliver much-needed aid.”