At least 117 people have died and several others are still missing after heavy flooding destroyed thousands of homes in Nigeria's Niger state, an emergency official said on Friday.
The death toll is a sharp rise from Thursday's figure of 21 people, Ibrahim Hussaini, head of the Niger State Emergency Management Agency, said, adding that some 3,000 houses were submerged in two communities in the north-central state. Nigeria is prone to flooding during the rainy season, which began in April.
In 2022, Nigeria experienced its worst wave of floods in more than a decade which killed more than 600 people, displaced around 1.4 million and destroyed 440,000 hectares of farmland.
The flooding incident in Niger state occurred on Wednesday night and continued into Thursday morning, Hussaini said, with a number of people still in the water.
The disaster struck late on Wednesday when unrelenting rainfall overwhelmed infrastructure in Mokwa, a crucial trading hub that connects food producers in the north with markets in the south. A local operations chief, Husseini Isah, said many residents were still unaccounted for and that survivors were in urgent need of assistance.
Among the devastated residents, 29-year-old civil servant Mohammed Tanko said he lost 15 relatives from the house where he was raised. “The property [is] gone. We lost everything,” he told reporters.
Another resident, fisherman Danjuma Shaba, 35, said his home had collapsed in the floodwaters, leaving him to sleep in a car park. “I don’t have a house to sleep in,” he said.
The flooding comes just days after Nigeria’s meteorological agency warned of possible flash floods across 15 states, including Niger State. Experts say such disasters are becoming more common due to the growing impact of climate change, combined with poor urban planning and inadequate drainage systems.
Floods routinely wreak havoc during Nigeria’s rainy season, which spans about six months. In September 2024, similar weather events in Maiduguri, northeast Nigeria, killed at least 30 people and displaced millions.
Last year marked one of the country’s deadliest flood seasons in decades, with over 1,200 people killed and 1.2 million displaced across 31 of Nigeria’s 36 states, according to the National Emergency Management Agency.
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