The primacy of land among the endowments of nature on the physical environment of man is obvious. This is captured in the rudimentary lessons of Economics where land is delineated, subtly though, as a superior among equal partners in the factors of production. That environment, land emphasised, inputs on its inhabitants is true; that people harness their environment is true, and that people could live confounded by the peculiarities of their environments holds true too. The physical circumstances surrounding a set of people could cast hallow around them. Such conditions could impress submission if the people lack the capacity of pragmatic re-engineering to restrain the constraints. A combination of these phenomena informs the viability or otherwise of any human habitation to sustain life. There have been established cases where individuals, peoples, organisations and governments have battled the stultifying muscles of environmental malcontents. In such cases, the bizarre imports of apparently hazardous environments are upturned and domesticated to serve man positively. This obtains more in advanced economies where premium technologies have continued to mollify the pains of environmental challenges.Anambra State in South-East Nigeria provides a compendious platform where the above tendencies apply in their various mixes. In the state, the endemic challenges of the environment are most manifest in the different degrees of erosion of scarce arable land into gullies, some of which have attained nightmarish dimensions. As the locations of the devastation abound, so are tales of woe from inhabitants of the several spots who have learnt to celebrate each passing day of survival as added benevolence of Providence. The people live in constant fear of ravaging erosion washing off their homesteads. If it were a few spots, and if the sites were not as gory, it would probably have been within the capacity of the people and government of the state to contend with; but with over 1,000 active erosion sites of various grades spread across the state, the littleness of the state government in the face of the challenge becomes manifest. The Government of Anambra State has, however, continued to intervene within the scope of its limited resources in battling the ecological crisis. But for the rescue mission of the state government and its evident results, it would have been worse for the growing number of victims of erosion. The Governor, Mr. Peter Obi, has continued to seek assistance from other governments and donor agencies, and the enormous goodwill that he enjoys across the globe is yielding positive results. Today, as never before, the Federal Government and many International Donor Agencies have offered to partner the state government in managing the emergency. While the World Bank is already designing intervention schemes for some of the sites which they have inspected, some other groups are indicating intentions of heeding the governor's appeal for a multifaceted approach to the threat of losing many more homesteads, arable lands and lives to vicious erosion and landslides.The other day I met a group whose passion to save the state from further devastation brought to do a painstaking video-recording of some of the appalling sites. Not only did the group record gory erosion sites at Agulu, Nanka, Nnewichi, Adazi-Nnukwu, Nimo, Nteje, Omaba in Onitsha, Awka, the submerging of large expanse of arable land along the coastline of the River Niger, etc, the members took special interest in first hand interaction with the sad residents of the sites who have lost good parts of their inelastic homesteads, houses and lives to raging erosion and landslide. When the leader of the group, Chuka Nnabuife, declared that they were representing a foreign interest group that wished to partner the state government in checking ecological degradation, you could feel hope on the faces of the people as they prayed to live to witness the fruition of Nnabuife's mission soon enough to avert greater disaster at their thresholds. The peculiarities of Anambra State erosion have thrown up specialised studies in Geosciences which identify the Nanka soil features, a case of loose fine soil lacking cohesive ingredients, as responsible for the vulnerability of the soil to external agents. The Nanka soil phenomenon derived its name from Nanka town where one of the most formidable active erosion sites known in West Africa exists. At Nanka, an incredibly large section of the community (homes, livestock, farmlands, and lives) has continued to slide into an ever widening and abysmal gully, leaving the survivors in ominous uncertainty as to what the next moment holds. The apprehension is more because of the characteristic malignance of the slide; it neither adopts a regular pattern in terms of size or side nor does it have established times of happening. The only constant feature has remained wanton devastation each time it strikes; and this is often. The records hold that a few hours after a serving Nigerian military Head of State visited the Nanka gully neighbourhood, the compound wherein he was received, with everything therein, got lost to the voracious gully. Nanka experience is representational of similar havoc that soil erosion causes in Anambra State South-East of Nigeria. Recently, the residents of Omaba at Onitsha, the commercial nerve-centre of the Igbo nation, woke up one morning to see that they had lost a part of their neighbourhood and properties worth millions of Naira to landslide. Their helplessness in the face of imminent furtherance of the degradation made the state government to beckon on the World Bank that is now intervening in the designs and construction of structures to tame the ravages. Similar ecological damages exist at multiple locations in Awka, the capital of the state. Here, some residential neighbourhoods have caved in while many more are at the precipice, begging to be rescued from imminent doom. While the government of the state has provided palliatives to restrain the escalation of the menace in sites like Umuchiani-Ekwulobia, Nnewichi, Adazi-Nnukwu, Nkpor and a few other places, there are many troubled locations demanding urgent attention. The spread of these and the huge financial demands to abate their furtherance explain the desperation in the pleas of the state government for aids towards saving the state from sliding into nothingness, as the state grossly lacks the capacity to tackle the enormous ecological challenges it is faced with.'Anarado wrote in from Adazi-Nnukwu in Anambra State.
Click here to read full news..
