By Dan Amasingha, Minna

The Niger State Government and Northern Senators’ Forum have called for lasting measures to tackle the recurring flooding ravaging communities across Niger State, particularly Shiroro and other riverine areas.

While the state government is developing a two-abode system that will allow residents of flood-prone communities to relocate temporarily to designated upland settlements during the rainy season and return home in the dry season, the Northern Senators’ Forum is demanding a comprehensive Shiroro Flood Management Master Plan to address the root causes of the perennial disaster.

The Chairman of the Northern Senators’ Forum, Senator Abdulaziz Musa Yar’Adua (Katsina Central), said the proposed master plan should provide a scientifically determined flood-buffer operating strategy for the Shiroro, Kainji and Jebba dams.

The senators also called for a permanent flood forecasting and early-warning system, trained local volunteers in downstream communities, and a comprehensive floodplain resettlement programme that would provide planned settlements, compensation and livelihood support for affected residents.

They further demanded an independent technical review of dam operations, reservoir capacity and spillway performance in view of changing climate conditions, saying the exercise would help determine how water releases should be managed in the future.

The forum noted that flooding had become a recurring threat to Shiroro and other riverine communities, stressing that emergency measures must be implemented alongside long-term solutions.

It urged the Federal and state governments, in collaboration with local authorities, to ensure prompt distribution of relief materials to verified victims, provide temporary shelters with basic health and sanitation facilities, and deploy emergency evacuation and early-warning teams to flood-prone communities before the peak of the rainy season.

The senators also urged residents to heed safety advisories and desist from building on waterways and natural drainage channels.

They cited the 2025 Mokwa flood tragedy and a 2025 vulnerability study which found that 32 per cent of Shiroro Local Government Area was highly prone to flooding as evidence of the urgent need for action.

Meanwhile, the Niger State Commissioner for Humanitarian Affairs and Disaster Management, Dr. Ibrahim Ahmed Inga, said the state government had conceived the two-abode system as a practical response to the annual displacement of riverine communities by floods.

Under the initiative, residents would move to designated upland settlements during the rainy season and return to their ancestral communities when the flood season ends.

Inga explained that the arrangement was necessary because many residents were reluctant to permanently abandon their ancestral homes, particularly because their livelihoods depend heavily on water resources.

He said the government was committed to protecting lives and property, noting that women and children were often among the worst affected during disasters.

Speaking on the recent flash flood in Minna, which destroyed hundreds of houses following a heavy downpour, the commissioner described the incident as a major disaster.

He said the government was compiling data on victims and assessing the extent of damage to determine the appropriate assistance required.

Inga also blamed part of the flooding on indiscriminate construction along waterways, warning residents that blocking natural drainage channels would inevitably worsen the impact of heavy rainfall.

“We want to advise people to be more conscious of their attitude towards the environment,” he said, warning that water would naturally find its way through blocked channels and could destroy houses and other property.

The commissioner appealed to development partners and the Federal Government to provide additional support after the ongoing assessment by the Niger State Emergency Management Agency.

He disclosed that emergency management help desks and offices had been activated across the state to enable residents to report flood-related incidents and obtain timely assistance.

According to him, the activation followed the inclusion of Niger State among areas identified by the Nigerian Meteorological Agency as being at risk of flooding during the current rainy season.

With the state government pursuing seasonal relocation and emergency-response measures, and the senators pushing for a comprehensive dam-management and resettlement strategy, both efforts point to the need for Niger State to move beyond annual relief operations towards a coordinated, long-term flood management system.

From Ayinde Akintade, Osogbo

Tension has heightened in Osun State ahead of Saturday’s governorship election, with the Accord Party alleging that at least 29 people have been killed in politically related incidents, while the police have summoned APC Senator Francis Fadahunsi over a controversial campaign remark allegedly urging supporters to “kill” members of the rival party.

In a letter dated August 12, 2026, to the Head of the European Union Delegation to Nigeria and ECOWAS, Gautier Migot, Accord National Chairman Maxwell Mgbudem appealed to the EU to intervene diplomatically and help de-escalate the political situation in the state.

Mgbudem alleged that the political atmosphere had deteriorated, citing violence, arrests, intimidation and harassment of political actors and supporters. He claimed that at least 29 persons had been killed in incidents allegedly linked to the political crisis, with several others injured.

The Accord chairman further alleged that more than 60 members and supporters of the party had been arrested and detained in Abuja and Nasarawa State.

He also questioned what he described as the selective deployment of federal law-enforcement and regulatory agencies during the election period, while stressing that the party did not oppose legitimate investigations or lawful enforcement.

According to him, the timing and perceived selectivity of official actions could undermine confidence in the electoral process if they were not demonstrably impartial, transparent and consistent with due process.

The party also drew the EU’s attention to a viral video involving Senator Fadahunsi, alleging that he called for Accord members to be killed wherever they were found. Fadahunsi has denied that he intended to incite violence.

The controversy prompted the Osun State Police Command to summon the senator. In a letter dated August 11 and signed by the Commissioner of Police, Elections, Osun State, Samuel Etaifo Erale, Fadahunsi was directed to appear before the State Criminal Investigation Department in Osogbo at 11am on Wednesday, August 12, to clarify the circumstances surrounding the alleged remarks.

The police described the reported statement as potentially “threatening, inciting and intimidating”, noting that the video had circulated widely on social and electronic media platforms.

Fadahunsi’s team, however, rejected the interpretation that the senator was calling for physical attacks. In a statement titled “Kill Osun Accord with Votes, Not Violence,” his aides said the comment was political and metaphorical, insisting that he was urging APC supporters to defeat the Accord Party at the ballot box through peaceful and democratic means.

The development comes amid an increasingly heated campaign ahead of the August 15 governorship election. Governor Ademola Adeleke has accused the APC of using thugs to attack his supporters, allegations the party has disputed.

Against the backdrop of the competing allegations, Accord urged the EU to use its diplomatic influence to encourage Nigerian authorities to guarantee a level playing field for all parties and publicly reinforce the need for a free, fair, transparent and peaceful election.

Mgbudem said such intervention should focus on preventive diplomacy, arguing that early international engagement could help avert further escalation and reinforce the principle that political competition must remain peaceful and governed by the rule of law.

With the election only days away, the allegations, police investigation and rival claims of political intimidation have further intensified scrutiny of the security environment surrounding the Osun poll.

By Uche Uwaleke

During a recent academic study tour of key financial institutions in Malaysia with some of my PhD students from Nasarawa State University, Keffi, I had the opportunity to visit Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM), the Central Bank of Malaysia, where senior officials made presentations on the Bank’s mandate and institutional framework.

What particularly caught my attention was the positioning of sustainable economic growth as the ultimate objective, with monetary stability serving as an important means towards achieving that broader objective.

I was equally struck by the emphasis placed on enhancing the financial well-being of households and businesses as one of the Bank’s strategic thrusts.

These aspects of the Malaysian framework prompted me to reflect on what Nigeria might learn from a central banking model that appears to place monetary stability within a broader developmental conception of economic policy.

The Malaysian experience therefore offers Nigeria an opportunity to revisit a fundamental question about the role of a central bank in a developing economy: should monetary stability be regarded essentially as an end in itself, or as one of the instruments through which the broader objective of sustainable economic growth and improved economic welfare can be achieved? The question is not whether monetary stability matters; it unquestionably does, because stable prices are indispensable to investment, savings, production and household welfare. The more important question is whether a developing economy such as Nigeria should expect its central bank to remain largely focused on monetary stability while leaving the pursuit of sustainable economic growth almost entirely to the fiscal authority.

It has been argued that the real issue for Nigeria is not the formal scope of the Central Bank of Nigeria’s mandate but the quality of coordination between monetary and fiscal authorities.

There is considerable merit in this argument. Monetary policy does not operate in isolation from fiscal policy, and every significant monetary-policy decision has implications for government debt-servicing costs, business financing, household borrowing, investment and productive capacity. Fiscal policy, in turn, affects inflation, liquidity conditions, exchange rates and the effectiveness of monetary policy. It is therefore difficult to envisage a successful economic policy framework in which the monetary and fiscal authorities operate as though they inhabit entirely separate economic universes.

However, while coordination is necessary, I do not believe it is sufficient. The critical question is how such coordination should be institutionalized and sustained beyond the personalities or policy preferences of particular administrations and central-bank managements.

Coordination is essentially a process, whereas a statutory mandate establishes an institutional obligation. If sustainable economic growth is not expressly recognized within the legal framework governing the CBN, there is a risk that successive managements of the Bank will concentrate overwhelmingly on those objectives that are most clearly articulated in the law and regard broader developmental concerns as secondary or discretionary. This is why I believe that an amendment to the CBN Act of 2007 deserves serious consideration.

I submit that the CBN Act should explicitly recognize sustainable economic growth as an overarching objective, while retaining monetary and financial stability as indispensable conditions for achieving it. Such an amendment would not mean transforming the CBN into a development agency, asking it to substitute for the fiscal authority, or giving it a licence to sacrifice price stability whenever growth becomes politically desirable.

Rather, it would establish a statutory framework within which the CBN is expected to consider how its monetary and financial policies can contribute to productive capacity, investment, employment and the financial well-being of households and businesses. There is an important distinction between giving the CBN responsibility for development and giving it a responsibility to contribute to development; it is the latter that I am advocating.

The experience of the United States is instructive in this regard. The Federal Reserve operates under a dual mandate that includes price stability and maximum employment, demonstrating that recognition of broader economic outcomes within a central bank’s statutory framework does not necessarily undermine monetary-policy credibility or central-bank independence.

If a highly developed economy with deep and sophisticated financial markets can accommodate broader economic objectives within its central-bank framework, there is little reason to assume that a developing economy such as Nigeria must necessarily confine its central bank to an exceptionally narrow conception of its responsibilities.

Indeed, given Nigeria’s structural challenges, including inadequate productive capacity, limited access to finance, weak industrialization and high unemployment, the case for a framework that recognizes the developmental implications of monetary and financial policy may be even stronger.

Another argument that deserves serious consideration is Nigeria’s recent experience with development finance under the previous CBN administration.

The Bank became deeply involved in several intervention programmes designed to support agriculture, manufacturing and other sectors of the economy, and some of these interventions understandably generated concerns about the appropriate boundaries between monetary policy, fiscal policy and credit allocation.

Questions were also raised about their scale, implementation and institutional consequences. Those concerns should not be dismissed, but neither should we draw the conclusion that developmental central banking has no legitimate place in a developing economy.

The fact that a policy instrument can be abused does not invalidate the underlying principle. The appropriate lesson is that development-oriented interventions must operate within clear rules, transparency, accountability, institutional limits and proper coordination with fiscal policy.

Nigeria should therefore avoid moving from one extreme to another: from a CBN that attempts to do too much to one that does too little. The challenge is to identify the institutional middle ground in which the central bank remains credible and disciplined in preserving monetary and financial stability while recognizing the structural realities of a developing economy.

Such a central bank would not indiscriminately allocate credit, finance government programmes or substitute for fiscal policy, but neither would it regard the cost and availability of finance to productive enterprises as entirely outside its legitimate concerns.

The Malaysian example also invites reflection on Nigeria’s financial regulatory architecture. It has been suggested that Malaysia and Nigeria both operate broadly fragmented financial regulatory systems, but the two arrangements are not comparable in degree.

Malaysia’s principal financial-sector regulatory architecture is considerably more concentrated, with Bank Negara Malaysia and the Securities Commission playing the central regulatory roles, whereas Nigeria has a considerably more dispersed structure involving institutions such as the CBN, Securities and Exchange Commission, NDIC, NAICOM and PENCOM.

This difference has implications for regulatory coordination, policy coherence and the transmission of financial policy across the economy.

The lesson, however, is not that Nigeria should simply reproduce Malaysia’s institutional structure, but that we should examine carefully what institutional arrangements enable monetary stability, financial stability and developmental objectives to coexist without compromising central-bank credibility.

There is also a compelling argument that Nigeria should not make development dependent upon the discretion of the CBN. Development should not depend on whether a particular governor happens to favour interventionist policies, nor should the central bank become the institution responsible for financing every developmental aspiration of government. I agree with this concern, but I do not see it as an argument against a broader statutory mandate.

On the contrary, it strengthens the case for a clearer institutional framework. The objective should be to create an ecosystem in which the fiscal authority remains primarily responsible for fiscal policy, public investment and broader development strategy, while the monetary authority performs its core functions with credibility and independence and contributes, within clearly defined boundaries, to the broader developmental objective.

The CBN does not need to do everything, but it should be expected to contribute to the right things. This distinction is particularly important when considering access to affordable credit.

The monetary-policy framework and financial-sector regulations established by the CBN have significant implications for whether businesses can obtain financing at costs compatible with productive investment.

If productive enterprises are consistently confronted with prohibitively expensive credit, while monetary and financial conditions systematically favour financial intermediation over productive investment, the consequences extend beyond conventional monetary indicators to investment, employment, production and economic growth.

This does not mean that the CBN should arbitrarily force banks to lend cheaply or undermine the principles of sound banking; it means that the Bank should be encouraged, within the limits of monetary and financial stability, to consider how its policies and regulatory framework can facilitate efficient financial intermediation and improve access to finance for productive sectors.

Some may argue that this approach risks undermining central-bank independence. I would argue the opposite.

Independence and coordination are not mutually exclusive. A central bank can retain operational independence while engaging in structured, transparent and rules-based coordination with the fiscal authority. Indeed, genuine independence may be strengthened when the respective responsibilities of the monetary and fiscal authorities are clearly defined and when coordination takes place within an established institutional framework rather than through informal political pressure.

The purpose of coordination is not for government to dictate monetary policy or for the CBN to dictate fiscal policy, but to ensure that the two arms of economic policy do not systematically work at cross-purposes.

It goes without saying that Nigeria should move beyond the simplistic choice between an interventionist central bank and a narrowly conservative one. What is needed is an enabling central bank: one that remains firmly committed to price and financial stability while recognizing that monetary stability is also a condition for sustainable investment, production, employment and economic transformation.

Such a central bank would work with the fiscal authority without becoming subordinate to it, support productive sectors without becoming a permanent allocator of credit, and facilitate financial inclusion without compromising the soundness of the financial system.

Most importantly, it would operate within a statutory framework that reflects the realities of a developing economy.

The debate, therefore, should not be reduced to whether the CBN should have a narrow or broad mandate. The more important question is what kind of institutional architecture Nigeria requires to achieve both monetary credibility and sustainable economic transformation.

Price stability remains indispensable, but price stability alone does not build factories, create productive jobs, expand businesses, improve household welfare or transform an economy.

Those outcomes require fiscal policy, industrial policy, infrastructure, human capital, financial-sector development and effective institutions, with monetary policy playing an important complementary role.

For this reason, I believe Nigeria should seriously consider amending the CBN Act of 2007 to recognize sustainable economic growth as the ultimate goal, while preserving monetary and financial stability and protecting the operational independence of the Bank.

Properly designed, such an amendment would not be a licence for reckless intervention; rather, it would provide the foundation for a more disciplined form of developmental central banking in which the CBN’s role is clearly defined, its independence protected, and the developmental implications of its monetary and financial policies explicitly acknowledged.

The Malaysian experience does not tell Nigeria to become Malaysia. It tells us something more important: institutional choices matter. Nigeria must therefore design institutions that respond to its own economic realities while learning from countries that have demonstrated the possibility of combining monetary credibility with developmental ambition.

The objective should not be to make the CBN more powerful, but to make Nigeria’s economic-policy architecture more coherent, coordinated and capable of delivering sustainable and inclusive growth. That, in my view, is the more consequential lesson that the Malaysian experience offers Nigeria.

Prof Uche Uwaleke is the Director of the Nasarawa State University Institute of Capital Market Studies and President of the Capital Market Academics of Nigeria.