UN humanitarians are rushing to assist scores of newly displaced people in northeast Nigeria, after torrential rains caused a dam to collapse and flood the area, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) said on Friday.

Alau Dam, located just over 10 miles to the south of Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State, collapsed in the middle of the night on Tuesday, forcing hundreds of thousands from their homes.

Emmanuel Bigenimana, the head of WFP’s office in Maiduguri, said that he managed to fly over the city in a UN humanitarian air service (UNHAS) helicopter dispatched by WFP, to conduct a rapid assessment of damage and needs.

“What I have seen is really heartbreaking,” he said, describing homes, infrastructure, roads, schools, hospitals submerged by water.

Sleeping on the street

“Many, many people - I'm talking about over 200,000 - 300,000 displaced people - are overcrowded in several IDP (internally displaced persons) camps and also on the streets.”

WFP reported that the dam collapse saw river water overrunning 50 per cent of Maiduguri and state authorities issued evacuation orders to residents in the affected areas, appealing for humanitarian support.

Speaking from the centre of one of the IDP camps, Mr. Bigenimana said that WFP has managed to open soup kitchens to provide hot meals to the affected people and was scaling up its response together with the authorities and partners.

The soup kitchens located in three camps - Teachers’ Village, Asheikh and Yerwa - aim to provide nutritious hot meals to “50,000 of the worst affected children, women, and men who have lost their homes,” WFP said, but more assistance is needed.

Compounding security crisis, economic hardship

“This is really an additional burden to already existing crises,” WFP’s Mr. Bigenimana stressed. “This region has been facing conflict for a decade.”

Borno State was one of the areas worst affected by the Boko Haram insurgency which, the UN said earlier this year, has been controlled to some extent.

“More recently, we have seen food inflation, food prices have been skyrocketing, really affecting millions of people who are facing food insecurity,” Mr. Bigenimana added.

The impacts of extreme weather are being felt severely across the country. Some 800,000 people in 29 states in Nigeria have been affected by floods as of September 2024, WFP said, and over 550,000 hectares of cropland have been flooded.

As of March this year, some 32 million people in the country were already facing acute hunger.

The UN’s food agency said that it needs $147.9 million to support food insecure people in Nigeria’s northeast over the coming six months.

For the flood-affected populations in Maiduguri, “recovery will take long,” Mr. Bigenimana said. “We need more resources to save lives and to put together efforts to respond to the crises - and also think of longer-term recovery and solutions.”