“The Silent Agony of Ekeke-Erah, Edo State: A Community Abandoned in the Wake of Disaster”

“The Silent Agony of Ekeke-Erah, Edo State: A Community Abandoned in the Wake of Disaster”

Since the 22nd of January, 2025, Ekeke-Erah has been engulfed in the harrowing aftermath of an unrelenting flood disaster that has ravaged both lives and livelihoods. For a protracted span of over 200 agonizing days, the community has been submerged in a state of infrastructural paralysis and humanitarian neglect, while the cries of the afflicted echo into seeming oblivion.

It is most regrettable, indeed a catastrophic dereliction of governmental responsibility, that till this very date no infrastructural succor has been extended in the realm of potable water provision through boreholes, nor has there been any rehabilitation or reconstruction of the collapsed bridges which constitute the very arteries of socio-economic life in Ekeke-Erah.

Worse still, the community continues to groan under the total absence of a healthcare facility, leaving men, women, and children at the mercy of diseases and untreated injuries. Pregnant women are left to fate, infants cry without medical attention, and the aged languish in silence—Ekeke-Erah is living through a medical exile within its own land.

The most grievous of all, however, remains the total abandonment of the peasant farmers, whose agricultural produce—the very backbone of their subsistence—was completely annihilated by the surging waters. Though comprehensive data of losses was meticulously transmitted to the Ministry of Agriculture, there has been no compensatory restitution, no remedial palliative, and no sign of empathetic intervention. What, then, is the value of data if it languishes as sterile statistics in bureaucratic archives, while men, women, and children are condemned to hunger, penury, and despair?

Yet, in the midst of this painful lamentation, we must acknowledge and appreciate the efforts of His Excellency the Governor of Edo State, through the Edo State Emergency Management Agency (EDOSEMA), for swiftly bringing relief materials to Ekeke-Erah community as an emergency response. That gesture, though temporary in nature, demonstrated that the cries of our people were not wholly ignored, and it stands as a testament that responsive governance is possible when duty meets compassion.

However, relief materials—by their very essence—are palliatives, not solutions. What Ekeke-Erah yearns for is a durable commitment: the drilling of boreholes to guarantee clean water, the rebuilding of bridges to restore economic life, the establishment of a healthcare facility to protect lives, and the fair compensation of farmers who lost their livelihoods.

This silence and inertia reek of institutional indifference and administrative aloofness toward a people who have been reduced to socioeconomic orphans within their own homeland. Ekeke-Erah stands today not merely as a geographical entity under duress, but as a symbol of state neglect, ecological vulnerability, and humanitarian abandonment.

One is compelled, with great emotional intensity, to interrogate: Shall the people of Ekeke-Erah continue to languish without drinkable water, without access to bridges, without healthcare, and without compensation for their agricultural devastation, while government functionaries luxuriate in comfort?

This is not merely an outcry; it is a solemn indictment of the structures that were erected to serve humanity but have instead become entangled in the web of inertia and insensitivity. History shall remember the silence of leaders in the face of this monumental suffering, even as it shall equally record the few moments of compassionate intervention.

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