While leading a delegation of representatives from the Federal Ministry of Water Resources and the World Health Organization (WHO) on a courtesy visit to Governor Douye Diri in Government House, Yenagoa, Mr. Matthias Schmale, the UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator in Nigeria and Representative of the Secretary-General, emphasized: “The first thing I will share publicly is that this is a crisis of major proportion.
In a statement, the governor’s chief press secretary, Mr. Daniel Alabrah, described Schmale as comparing the situation in Bayelsa to the floods in Pakistan that grabbed attention from around the world.
The UN Coordinator, who had Friday accompanied Governor Diri on a tour of some flood-affected towns in Southern Ijaw Local Council, said that his attendance was in response to the governor’s letter and that it was imperative to address the catastrophic effects of the flooding.
He added that the UN would promote the recovery phase and mobilize resources to help people get back to their regular lives.
Schmale emphasized how depressing it was that people’s lives, livelihoods, and possessions had been destroyed by the flood and urged the federal government and the international community to work together to support the remaining phases of the immediate response and recovery.
He described what he witnessed in Bayelsa as what he saw of Pakistan a few months ago. The size of the United Kingdom, or one-third of Pakistan, was submerged.
He asserted that climate change was not primarily caused by Nigeria and Bayelsa. Since they were both the recipients and not the cause, there was a moral case to be made for compensation.
In response, Governor Douye Diri hailed the UN for being the first organization to act immediately in Bayelsa and thanked the UN Secretary-General for sending his envoy to the state at a time when it required assistance.
In response to the minister’s remark, IYC President Peter Timothy Igbifa characterized it as improbable, reckless, offensive, and inflammatory and urged President Muhammadu Buhari to look into how she handled the crisis across the nation.
Igbifa asserted that the minister had not traveled to Bayelsa or dispatched a team to the state to assess the reality of the flood situation. Instead, she may have relied on armchair data she prepared from the comfort of her home.
He claimed that Farooq had demonstrated via her careless remark that she was a greater calamity than the flood and that she was either engaging in ethnic prejudice or dancing on the graves of people who died in Bayelsa as a result of the flood.
Igbifa recalled that IYC had requested the Federal Government to send a presidential fleet to the state to rescue stranded victims during the severity of the flood when all hope had been lost in Bayelsa.
