Flooded fields and fading seasons

Climate change is one of the greatest challenges facing the world today, especially in this part of the world.

Once upon a time people could conveniently predict the rainy seasons and the dry seasons. Back in my junior secondary school days, we were told in integrated science that the rainy season starts towards the end of March into the beginning of April and continues till August, when the rains stop for a while and then continue till September, and then the dry season, as we call it, starts from October till about March, and the circle just continues.

But human activities like the burning of bushes, oil exploration, and other industrial activities have constantly polluted the surface of the earth and have led to an imbalance in the atmospheric condition of our environment, resulting in the climatic changes that we now experience.

I was born and raised in the southern part of my country, Nigeria, and the area is referred to as a coastal region where we are surrounded by water, and according to geography, rains are more common in coastal regions.

There was once a time when we started experiencing serious rainfalls from January 1st of a particular year, and because of the intensity of the rains that year, the government announced that the current buildup at the national dam was too much, so they had to open up the dam to release some of the water.

In that year alone, thousands of people were displaced because the people who had their houses in lowlands and those whose houses were within a 3-kilometer radius of connecting rivers were displaced, especially in the riverine parts of my own state, Delta State, and then some other communities in neighboring states like Bayelsa and Rivers, respectively.

The floods got into the farms of some farmers whom I know personally.

And for many of them, they couldn't go to their cassava farms or their plantain plantations, and they lost a lot of their harvest in that year because of the moisture. Besides, the waters weren't safe for any of the farmers to go in because they came with snakes and all kinds of aquatic life.

In one of my travels that year to Bomadi local government of Delta State, Nigeria, I saw people's cars and some whole buildings submerged in water because of the excessive rainfall.

The flooding particularly caused a hike in the price of available food commodities. Some people who couldn't swim were carried by the current of heavy waves that the waters carried, and a lot of people became internally displaced.

Although I wasn't personally affected by this flood, I saw the impact it had on the lives of those farmers around me, which also caused a lot of food hikes at the time.

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