Contingency Planning and Flood Disaster Management in Nigeria: A Critical Study

This paper examines the persistent challenge of floods in Nigeria despite established institutional frameworks for disaster management. As a result, millions of people are displaced each year. Based on this premise, this article investigates if there are contingency planning and measures to manage flood in Nigeria to curb disaster mismanagement towards ensuring sufficient food production, distribution and consumption in the country. This is done through the exploration of government policies on flood management particularly how best government prepare for flood pandemic. Theoretically, the article adopts the Emergency Management theory and contingency approach as the framework of analysis and relies heavily on secondary data which includes relevant contemporary books, peer-reviewed articles, newspaper reports on flood in Nigeria, images showing how flood ravaged some parts of Nigeria, and Government reports among others. The study dissects the experiences of flood disasters with occurrence of cases from a few Nigerian states; and a desk-top data analysis framework as its method of analysis. The study found out that insufficient funding, poor infrastructure, undue deforestation, environmental policy flip-flops, negligence of climate change records and lack of contingent response. Therefore, the study recommends afforestation, maintenance of dams, recovery commitment for the flood affected communities, appropriate responses to climate change records, environmental policy sustainability, a contingent model to flooding and effective application of emergency management principles.