Is Nigeria Ready for 2026 Floods?

SOStainabilityWeekly

Edited by Oke Epia, E-mail: sostainability01@gmail.com  | WhatsApp: +234 8034000706

Trends and Threads

There is something deeply unsettling about how predictable disaster has become in Nigeria. The rains no longer arrive as a surprise. The floods no longer shock. The warnings come early, the risks are mapped, the vulnerable communities are known, yet when the waters rise, the country still behaves as though it has been caught off guard. Early 2026 projections from the Nigerian Meteorological Agency (NiMet) and the Nigeria Hydrological Services Agency (NIHSA) indicate above-average rainfall across several parts of the country, with heightened flood risks in coastal and riverine states. These projections follow a dangerous pattern seen in 2012, 2018, 2022, and 2024, where intense rainfall and poor drainage combined to produce devastating floods.

NiMet’s Seasonal Climate Prediction (SCP) consistently warns of early onset and delayed cessation of rainfall in many regions. NIHSA’s Annual Flood Outlook (AFO) has repeatedly identified high-risk flood zones along the Niger and Benue rivers, including states like Kogi, Benue, Bayelsa, Delta, and Rivers. These are not new findings. The science is clear. The risk is predictable. So why does the response remain reactive, uncoordinated, and unsustainable?  

A Repeated Pattern of Flooding

In 2024, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA), more than 5 million Nigerians were affected by floods across 35 states. Over 1,000 people died. More than 640,000 were displaced at peak. Some 98,242 homes were damaged or destroyed. Cholera broke out. Malnutrition spiked among children in the northeast. The Alau Dam in Borno State collapsed on September 9, 2024, submerging 70 percent of Maiduguri overnight, killing at least 150 people, and displacing over 400,000. The UN’s World Food Programme called what they witnessed ‘heartbreaking.’

Then came 2025. The numbers improved with 27 states affected instead of 35, and fatalities were down from over 1,000 to 241. But here is the fundamental problem: 241 people still died. Half a million people were still affected. The bar for success in Nigeria’s flood management is so low that ‘fewer people died’ passes as an achievement. Each time, the pattern repeats: warnings are issued, responses are delayed, and the consequences are devastating. So, the question is no longer whether Nigeria is aware of the risks. The question is whether Nigeria is willing to act on what it already knows.

The Details in the Data

Category	States / Regions Affected	Implication
Early Onset of Rains	Bayelsa, Rivers, Akwa Ibom, Cross River, Benue, Kogi, Nasarawa, Oyo, parts of Kebbi, Niger, Jigawa, Katsina, Kano, Adamawa, Taraba	Communities unprepared; drains not cleared; evacuation delayed
Longer-Than-Normal Season	Lagos, Benue, Enugu, Ebonyi, Ogun, Oyo, Nasarawa, Anambra, Kwara, Kebbi, Kaduna, Gombe, Taraba	Extended flood window; sustained agricultural destruction
Delayed Cessation	Lagos, Ogun, Anambra, Enugu, Cross River, Benue, Nasarawa, Kaduna	Floodwaters remain longer; disease risk escalates
Above-Normal Rainfall	Borno, Sokoto, Kebbi, Kaduna, Enugu, Cross River, Abia, Ebonyi, Akwa Ibom, FCT	High risk of flash floods, dam overflow, river bursting
Late Onset Only	Borno State	Misleadingly calm start; heavy rainfall arrives compressed

NiMet 2026 Rainfall Projections by State Category (Source: NiMet 2026 SCP, February 2026)

What the 2026 data means in plain language is that at least 13 states will experience rainy seasons longer than normal, including Lagos, Benue, Enugu, Ebonyi, Ogun, Oyo, Nasarawa, Anambra, Kwara, Kebbi, Kaduna, Gombe, and Taraba. Several states will receive more rain than their long-term averages. The south-south and Niger-Benue corridor, historically the hardest hit, is already flagged for early onset and potentially late-ending seasons. This combination is a recipe for sustained, devastating flooding. Already, some parts of Lagos State, specifically Lekki, are experiencing flash flooding and traffic disruption from unusual off-season rains. Other states, including Ogun, Kogi, Anambra, and Ebonyi recorded atypical early rainfall, inundating drainage systems not yet prepared for the season. This is the forecast playing out in real time.

Who Is Responsible and Are They Ready?

Nigeria has the architecture of a functional disaster management system. What it lacks is the consistent political will and funding to make that architecture work before, not after disasters strike. NEMA has shown genuine improvement in coordination. Its Director-General, Mrs. Zubaida Umar, convened a March 2026 stakeholder forum with NIHSA, NiMet, the Red Cross, and other partners. She acknowledged the systemic gaps and said the right words: ‘Preparedness must be proactive, not reactive.’ But NEMA cannot do it alone. The agency is sometimes underfunded. Its mechanism requires it to lean on state governments, many of which have no functional disaster management protocols, no state emergency funds, and no working early warning dissemination to rural communities.

NIHSA produces the Annual Flood Outlook (AFO), which identifies the specific river basins, states, and communities most at risk. For 2026, the AFO was scheduled for release on April 15, and the agency has spoken of improved forecasting accuracy. NiMet’s accuracy has reached 74 percent. That is significant. But accuracy means nothing if the people who need to act on those forecasts do nothing about it.

Here is an uncomfortable truth: federal warnings are consistently issued. State governments consistently ignore them, delay evacuations, fail to dredge drains, fail to enforce building codes on flood plains, and then ask for federal emergency funds after the damage is done. The states with the most chronic exposure — Benue, Kogi, Anambra, Delta, Bayelsa, Rivers, Lagos, and Adamawa must stop treating flood season as an annual surprise.

What is the pre-positioned emergency response capacity for 2026? How many tonnes of food, how many emergency shelter kits, how many water purification units are already staged in the states forecast to be most severely impacted? These are not theoretical questions. They are the difference between life and death when floods hit in August and September or thereabout.

The Role of the SDGs Office

Flooding in Nigeria is not gender-neutral; it is a crisis that consistently falls hardest on women, children, and already marginalized communities, and the data from the 2022 floods make this impossible to ignore. According to the data from several sources, including NEMA and the UN OCHA, at least 3.2 million people were affected, over 1.4 million displaced, and more than 600 lives lost.  But beyond these millions are the real disparities: displacement camps were largely filled with women and children, rural female farmers lost entire harvests, and low-income communities in flood-prone areas saw their homes and livelihoods wiped out with little or no safety nets. This is where SDG5 (Gender Equality) and SDG10 (Reduced Inequalities) are clearly failing because those who are already disadvantaged are the ones who suffer the deepest losses and face the slowest recovery.

The pattern extends into cities, where poor drainage, unplanned settlements, and weak enforcement of environmental laws continue to expose informal communities where the urban poor live to repeated flooding, directly undermining SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities). Children in these environments face disrupted education, increased disease risks, and long-term social setbacks, while women shoulder the burden of rebuilding households with limited support. At the same time, the scale and frequency of these disasters reflect the growing intensity of climate impacts, placing SDG13 (Climate Action) at the center of Nigeria’s flood crisis.

This is why attention must now turn sharply to the Office of the Special Adviser to the President on SDGs. With millions affected in just one flood season, what concrete, measurable steps has this office taken to ensure that flood preparedness and response strategies are gender-responsive and inequality-focused? Where is the publicly available, disaggregated data showing how women, children, and persons with disabilities are being protected before floods happen, not just counted after disaster strikes? And how is this office holding ministries, states, and local governments accountable for aligning flood response with SDG 5 (Gender Equality), SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities), SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities), and SDG13 (Climate Action)? Because until flood policy is intentionally designed around those most at risk, Nigeria will keep reporting millions affected but failing the very people the SDGs were meant to protect.

Early warning without early action is negligence.

Nigeria does not lack data. It does not lack institutions. What it lacks is urgency, coordination, and the political will to prioritize prevention over reaction. Flood management cannot continue to be treated as a seasonal emergency; it must be addressed as a structural governance issue.
Some areas demand immediate attention. Urban drainage systems must be treated as critical infrastructure, not afterthoughts. Cities must invest in expanding and maintaining drainage networks before the rains begin, not during or after flooding has already occurred. Land use laws must be enforced without compromise. Building on floodplains should not be normalized, excused, or overlooked. The cost of inaction is measured in lives, not just property. Flood forecasting must translate into localized, actionable plans. Emergency preparedness must move beyond paperwork. Drills, awareness campaigns, and evacuation planning should be visible and consistent, not rushed reactions when a disaster is imminent. And above all, there must be transparency. Nigerians have a right to know how funds allocated for flood control are being spent. Who is tracking these expenditures? What benchmarks are used to measure preparedness? Who is held responsible when those benchmarks are not met? The 2026 rainy season is approaching with all the warning signs already in place. If the country once again finds itself overwhelmed by floods, it will not be because the disaster was unpredictable. It will be because the warnings were ignored.

Washing and Hushing

The Boom and Doom of Nigeria’s Real Estate

Nigeria is building. Cranes dot the skylines of Lagos and Abuja as new gated estates emerge where farmlands and wetlands once stood. Peri-urban corridors that were quiet a decade ago now hum with the machinery of construction. The real estate sector is booming, and by nearly every conventional economic measure, this is being celebrated as progress.

The country’s real estate market was valued at USD 29.2 billion in 2024 and is projected to climb to USD 40 billion by 2030. Lagos recorded a 39.5 percent surge in property prices in 2024 alone, and among the highest in Africa. Real estate now contributes roughly 5.45 percent to Nigeria’s GDP. Diaspora remittances, a significant share of which flows into property, reached USD 20.93 billion in 2024. By the logic of the press releases and the investor deck, Nigeria is thriving. But there is a question this boom has not answered, a question that no ribbon-cutting ceremony has been honest enough to ask: who, exactly, is all of this for?

The hard questions

Because the same country that celebrates a real estate market valued at over USD 40 billion is also burdened with a housing deficit of between 20 and 28 million units, according to the Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria (FMBN) and other industry estimates. It is the same country where cement prices have surged by over 80 percent between 2022 and 2024. It is the same country where effective housing finance rates climb close to 30 percent, reflecting prevailing lending conditions. And it is the same country where about 87 million people live below the poverty line, according to the World Bank. Nigeria needs investment, needs housing, needs infrastructure. But growth that is allowed to proceed without accountability, about who benefits, and who absorbs the cost, is not development. It is extraction dressed in the language of progress. And Nigeria has been dressing it that way for long enough.

In November 2025, SOStainability conducted a Sustainability Visibility Scan (SVS) across eleven of Nigeria’s leading real estate companies. The SVS is not a values audit or a corporate investigation: it measures one thing only: what these companies are willing to make publicly visible about their climate and environmental responsibilities. The rule is simple. If it is not on the official website, it does not count. No social media posts, no interviews, no third-party endorsements. Just what you communicate to show the public. The results were not surprising. Across all eleven firms, including Adron Homes, Landwey, Dutum Construction, UPDC, Land Republic, Sabreworks Real Estate, Besitz Group, Brains and Hammers, PWAN Homes, Veritasi Homes, and Knight Frank Nigeria, the SVS found a sector that is almost entirely invisible on climate. Most of these companies publish CSR pages. They announce donations. They photograph staff at community events. But not one of them publishes a structured climate policy. Not one of them discloses a measurable climate target. Not one of them reveals a governance structure, not alone a sustainability officer, or an ESG unit responsible for environmental decisions. The sole exception in the entire scan was a single ESG-themed knowledge document linked by Knight Frank Nigeria. Everything else: silence.

This is a sector building Nigeria’s physical future, consuming cement and steel, filling wetlands, running thousands of diesel generators, while telling the public absolutely nothing about the environmental consequences. And it is not doing so by accident. This is a strategic choice. When there is no climate policy, there is no accountability. When there is no reporting, the carbon footprint remains invisible. When there is no governance, no one is responsible. That is a very convenient arrangement for an industry expanding this fast in a country with a fragile regulatory environment.

The SVS is clear: what cannot be seen cannot be managed. And what cannot be managed will not change. Nigeria’s residential sector already consumes roughly 60 percent of national electricity, most of it powered by diesel generators in every estate and apartment block across the country. Globally, buildings account for 34 percent of energy demand and 37 percent of energy-related carbon emissions. Yet the sector shaping Nigeria’s urban skyline has nothing to say about its role in the climate crisis. That is not an oversight. That is a decision, and it should be named as one.

The social cost missing from the balance sheet

There is a cost to this invisibility, and it is being paid not by the developers, not by the investors, not by the regulatory agencies who sign off on approvals. It is being paid by communities. It is being paid by the urban poor. It is being paid by the environment. And because none of these costs appear in any company’s financial or non-financial disclosure, the industry continues to grow without ever being asked to settle the bill.

Real estate expansion in Nigeria has become increasingly synonymous with displacement. Peri-urban communities are pushed off the land they have lived on for generations to make way for gated estates that will never be marketed to them. Wetlands that naturally manage floodwaters are filled for foundations, shifting the flood burden onto the unprotected low-income neighborhoods downstream. Building collapses, a persistent feature of the Nigerian construction landscape, turn structural negligence into human tragedy, leaving behind rubble, grief, and no accountability. And across the country, natural public spaces that once belonged to everyone are being quietly handed over to private interests, with gate fees attached.

This is what a sector without ESG governance looks like in practice. The cost does not disappear. It is simply transferred invisibly, systematically, to the people with the least power to resist it.

Jabi Lake: A city watching its commons disappear

In February 2026, the Federal Capital Territory Administration signed Development Agreements with two private companies for the development of what has been described as a world-class recreational hub at Jabi Lake in Abuja. The FCT Minister, Nyesom Wike, spoke of turning Abuja into a destination city. One of the developer representatives promised a project comparable to Times Square in New York and the Dubai Fountain Water Show. Certificates of Occupancy were presented. Photographs were taken. It had all the trappings of a development success story.

But the residents of Abuja were not celebrating, which called for a deeper concern. Jabi Lake is a man-made reservoir covering approximately 1,300 hectares in the heart of the capital, built originally to supply water to Abuja’s early residents. After a larger dam took over that function, the lake became something else: a free, open, publicly accessible space where Abuja family’s picnic, young people jog, informal vendors trade, and the city breathes. In 2007, the area surrounding the lake was formally designated as Jabi Lake Park, written into the Abuja Master Plan as a protected recreational and ecological zone. That designation was not bureaucratic decoration. The Abuja Master Plan was built on the explicit principle that a planned capital must preserve green corridors, ecological buffers, and open civic spaces for all its residents, not just those who can pay for them.

That is why what followed the signing ceremony matters enormously. Within weeks, Abuja residents organized under the #SaveJabiPark movement. They cited excavation activity within the park. They raised concerns about the loss of one of the city’s few genuinely public spaces. They argued, compellingly, that the Abuja Master Plan was being set aside not because it had failed, but because it stood in the way of a profitable deal. And they asked, directly, a question that the FCTA has not yet answered with any real transparency: Who is this development for? This question matters more than any press release. Because in Nigeria, we have seen this story before. The language of modernization and world-class development has repeatedly been used to justify the conversion of shared public assets into privately managed amenities that price out the majority of users. The promise is always inclusion. The outcome is almost always exclusion. And by the time residents realise the distinction, the Certificates of Occupancy have already been signed.

Here is the diagnostic principle that should concern every Nigerian watching this story unfold: when the people who are supposed to benefit from a project are the loudest voices opposing it, that is not confusion, and it is not ignorance. It is intelligence. It is communities reading the pattern correctly, drawing on lived experience, and refusing to be told that this time will be different. Protest is not always resistance to progress. Sometimes it is the most accurate assessment of what progress actually means in this context and for whom.

This movement is not asking for the lake to remain frozen in time. Its organizers have made this point repeatedly. The ask is for development that is transparentand governed by the master plan rather than around it, and that genuinely preserves public access. That is not an unreasonable demand. That is, in fact, what a properly functioning government owes its citizens.