Nigeria Content Online

Residents of Yayale
Estate in the Dutse district of Garki in Abuja are constantly
threatened by floods resulting from the Federal Capital Development
Authority’s (FCDA) inconclusive work on roads in the area.

During a typical
rainy day, poor drainage within the estate causes floodwaters from the
road to rush into residents’ compounds, destroying property and
threatening lives.

Solomon Daudu, a
resident of the estate, said his building is worst hit when it rains.
Last Wednesday, he almost lost his Toyota Camry to the flood. Mr. Daudu
said he left for work in the morning and returned around 11:00am to
pick up his children for lunch. On their way home, at around 4:00 pm,
he received a phone call that his compound was flooded.

“The flood pushed
down the fence at the back of my house and pushed my car outside to the
main road after it forced open the gates,” he said.

“Everything kept outside the building was swept away in the flood,” he said.

However, officials
of the FCDA deny that the flooding is linked to the road construction.
The FCDA’s chief resident engineer, who declined to be named, said that
there was no need for the government to build additional drainage on
the road. Instead, he blamed the problem on the inability of the
estate’s developer to utilise the survey data for the area.

“If they had the survey data, they would have known that in future, there was going to be a major road there,” he said.

“We did our best on
that project and there is nothing more to it. There is no need for
drainages on express roads, or are we expected to provide drainages in
the estate too?”

He warned that the road will be expanded into a dual carriage way in future and that the estate will definitely be affected.

Irregular construction

But the residents
disagreed with the FCDA’s assessment. They pointed out that drainage
was provided on other sections of the road. Emmanuel Okoronkwo, a civil
engineer who lives in the estate, said the road project was poorly
executed.

“It is wrong of
them to have gone ahead to do this thing without providing for a
channel for the flood. They could have put what is called a ‘cut-off
drain’ and then channel it properly,” he said.

Mr. Okoronkwo said
that the road should not have been categorised as an expressway, as it
passed through a residential area. He said the government had evaded
its responsibility to the estate.

“You cannot provide
a road and not take care of that,” he said. “That is ignorance at its
height. You must channel water somewhere, otherwise you leave it to
wreak havoc,” he said.

Ahmed Yabagi,
chairman of the Yayale Estate Residents’ Association, said the problem
was the irregular planning and construction of the road. When the road
was designed, the estate was not in place. However, by the time the
road was constructed, no one bothered to update the initial survey data
for the road, which channelled the flood into the land where the estate
now stands.

Blame the management

The issue has been
complicated by poor government management of the estate, said Mr.
Yabagi. The estate was built in 2004 to provide accommodation for civil
servants. The head of service partnered with a private developer,
Shelter Initiatives, on the project, while the Federal Capital
Territory (FCT) provided the land.

Beneficiaries of
the housing scheme were to make monthly payments for their houses to
the government which would, in turn, remit a part of the money to the
private developer. However, the government has not been making adequate
remittances to the developer.

Mr. Yabagi said
that was why so many of the estate facilities, including the drainage
system, were in such a deplorable condition. The developer had even
sold some of the estate’s units in a bid to recover his money, he said.

There are over 150
residents within the estate and they have made several attempts to draw
the federal government’s attention to their plight, but to no avail.

“We demonstrated,
we blocked the road, and stopped the work on the road at a time. We had
also written to FCDA but no response yet,” said Mr. Yabagi.

“We equally held meetings with the office of the head of civil
service of the federation, but none had yielded fruits,” he said.