By Linus Unah
Patience Nwankwo sighs as she stares into the yawning hole in the ground near her home in southeastern Nigeria, the exposed red earth like an open wound slicing across the landscape.
“That big hole has swallowed farms, homes, and roads,” Nwankwo said, her voice quavering as she tells how erosion is creating ravines that are eating away at her hometown, Nanka, and neighbouring Agulu and Oko.
“It might swallow everything here if it is not fixed,” she said. Nwankwo, in her mid-70s, is a smallholder farmer whose home is now only 140 metres from the edge of the growing chasm.
The gully erosion in Nanka – one of the largest in Nigeria at 66 metres deep, 2,900 metres long and 349 metres wide, according to a recent study in the American Journal of Geographic Information System – is guzzling red earth from underneath people’s homes and farms, and making residents fear their property will be next.
The Nanka gully started forming around 1850, researchers say, and the regional soil erosion crisis has accelerated alarmingly in recent decades. It now threatens about 6,000 square kilometres or nearly six percent of Nigeria’s land mass, according to the World Bank. Read more…
