The National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) has said that the only antidote to the annual loss of lives, displacement of people from their natural abodes, including the destruction of farmlands, residential and commercial buildings by natural disasters, occasioned by floods and ocean surge particularly during the rainy season is for people to heed experts’ advice by abstaining from erecting structures on water channels as well as vacating their abodes to temporary places in the upland until the end of the rainy season.

This was stated on Tuesday by Abuja Zonal Coordinator of NEMA, Mr Ishaya Chinoko, during an interview with the Nigerian Tribune in Minna, Niger State.

The NEMA coordinator said that the problem with Nigerians is the belief that avoidable disasters are acts of God, noting that this is the reason the agency’s officials always embarked on sensitisation programmes.

“We do not believe in trying to see fire and then avoiding it because everybody knows that fire could be painful when you touch it. But some people would allow fire to burn them and thereafter attribute it to the will of God.”

Chinoko stated that the truth of the matter was that people were supposed to be educated on what they should be doing to avoid certain hazards in the environment that they live, stressing that, “it is better we are still doing that than waiting for people’s lives to be at a stake and then we begin to think of what to take to them.”

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