Flood Management Policies, Planning Capacities and the Health Implications in Nigeria

The present study investigated the link between the existing flood management policies and its bearing on the extent of its efficacy in flood control. The study adopted the survey researchdesign. The questionnaire was formed to obtain first- hand information from both flood plain administrators (FPAs) and residents in 23 Nigerian states referred as non FPAs (nFPAs). The FPAs were drawn from NEMA, NIMET, FEPA, and NIHSA. Furthermore, the Kruskal Wallis test was inferentially used at p = 0.05 to determine the agreement between grouped questionnaire responses with respect to the formulated hypotheses covering the study objectives. The results show that there is a direct relationship between incidence/magnitude and outbreak of diseases in flood prone areas (pcal = 0.881618823 > ptab = 0.05). This implies that serious health challenges are directly attributable to repetitive flooding. There areno differences in flood occurrences in the study areas between the years of adopting structuraland non-structural flooding approaches and the period these policies were not adopted (pcal =0.017740081 < ptab = 0.05). This indicates that the effort made in the provision of structural and non-structural policies has no bearing on the magnitude and frequency of flooding within the study area. There are no significant improvements in flood reductions, management and control following the adoption of organizational flood planning and hazard mitigation approaches. (pcal = 0.003184 < ptab = 0.05) which implies that flood reductions, management and control have continued to increase with no impact from organizational flood planning and hazard mitigation approaches within the study area. This shows that the flood risk management strategy is weak and reactive, providing relief to flood victims after flooding. Aproactive flood management and control strategy is needed which reflects the ecological makeup unique to the study area as developed in this study.