Two government ministries said on Friday that widespread flooding has killed more than 500 people in Nigeria, inundated nearly 90,000 homes and disrupted food and fuel supplies.
The floods have swept through 27 of Nigeria’s 36 states, affecting nearly 1.4 million people, the Ministries of Humanitarian Affairs and Disaster Management said in an online post.
Nigerian authorities said floods caused by unusually heavy rains had increased since early summer and were exacerbated by the leakage of water from the Lagdo Dam in neighboring Cameroon.
“The scale of the disaster … is huge,” Mustafa Habib Ahmed, director general of the National Emergency Management Agency, said in a statement.