Oyo averted two devastating flood disasters since Aug 2011 —Commissioner

The Commissioner for Finance, Oyo state, Abimbola Adekanmbi has disclosed that the state government had successfully averted what could have been two more devastating disasters in the state since that of Friday 26, August 2011 flood in the state.

Adekanmbi, who represented the state government with his counterpart from the Ministry of Environment and Water Resources, Chief Isaac Ishola, during a conference of Ibadan Urban Flood Awareness (IFAS) organised recently at the Niger Hall, Business School, Bodija, Ibadan.

According to him,”we have averted two devastating flood disaster in Oyo state after the August 26, 2011 disaster in the state. We are not celebrating prevention but we think we owe people a lot to let them know the right thing to also do to forestall it. This is not about politics but this government of Senator Abiola Ajimobi is very serious about absolute prevention from our end, hence reason for a master plan to get this done.

“The Ibadan master plan has been presented to various stakeholders and this includes: the drainage master plan and solid waste master plan.

“In recent times, you will notice that the water flooding in Ibadan in the last one month cannot be compared to what they experienced in Lagos state. This is because the state government had dredged around 36 selected rivers between June and the second week of July 2017.

“The state wants to ensure safety of lives of the citizens. Flooding took a lot of lives. The state government wants to put in place strong resilient structures so that future flooding would not cause disaster.In areas we can prevent, we put in preventive measures, areas where we can reduce, we will reduce the impact and prepare the people so that they can know all that would be put in place by the Ibadan Urban Flood Management Project (IUFMP).”

In his welcome address, the Commissioner for Environment and Water Resources, Chief Isaac Ishola, pin-pointed the need for the residents of the state to change their attitude to house building, solid waste disposal and other attitudes that could jeopardise the effort of government in reducing risk of flood to the barest minimum.

“Every interested stakeholder must be ready to work with the state government to forestall flood and not manage flood scenarios in the state. The people must know that we can reduce the natural factor causing flood. Research and reliable data have shown that human error is a lot when considering factors aiding flood in the state.”

There were questions and answers as well as contributions from representatives of various organisations on the roles of stakeholders including government agencies.