With 34 of Nigeria’s 36 states submerged in flood and other climate-related disasters in recent times, President Muhammadu Buhari has said Nigeria has failed to live up to its responsibility to fight these hazards.
Buhari said this in an opinion piece in Washington Post where he said African governments (including Nigeria) have “repeatedly failed to meet their commitments to the $100 billion fund for climate adaptation and mitigation…”
He lamented the poor support from the international community to assist developing countries to fight these existential challenges. He wrote “Africa is the continent worst affected by climate change despite contributing the least to it. Even though the COP27’s agenda notes the need for compensation for loss and damages (as distinct from adaptation and mitigation funding), that demand has mostly been met with silence in the West.”
He continued by saying there was no point in telling “Africans they can’t use their own resources. If Africa were to use all its known reserves of natural gas — the cleanest transitional fossil fuel — its share of global emissions would rise from a mere 3 percent to 3.5 percent.”
He blamed Western countries for their inabilities to take “politically difficult decisions that hurt domestically” on the issue of climate change and adaptability for developing countries like Nigeria.
The UN estimates that more than 2.8 million people have been impacted by Nigeria’s worst floods in a decade, with 1.3 million displaced and over 600 lives lost.
Several world leaders including the British monarch, King Charles III, have commiserated with Nigeria over recent flooding in the country.
QUEST TIMES earlier reported that following the unprecedented flooding that ravaged the country, President Buhari ordered the Minister of Water Resources, Engr Suleiman Adamu, to come up with a plan to prevent future occurrence of the disaster.