Several neighborhoods in N’Djamena were flooded Friday, August 5 after torrential rains that have affected the Chadian capital for more than a week, noted an AFP journalist.
“N’Djamena is a basin, much of the north of the city is under water“, told AFP the mayor of the city, Ali Haroun. “We have set up water pumping stations“, he added. “It is quite possible that houses have collapsed due to bad weather“said Ali Haroun, without being able to give an assessment.
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The region is regularly affected by floods. In August 2020, more than 11,500 people had been displaced following heavy rains in the Chadian capital. “We put motor pumps to evacuate the water, without success. The houses keep falling down“Said Armand Mbahnoel, a resident of the 7th arrondissement whose house was completely flooded. “The roads remained impassable and blocked. The water has invested all the houses in this sector, but there was no collapse of the houses today“said Moustapha Abagana, a resident of the same district, one of the most affected by the floods.
According to the United Nations, in 2021, 5.5 million Chadians, more than a third of the population of this landlocked country in Central Africa, needed a “emergency humanitarian aid“. A situation that has worsened due to the war in Ukraine where Russia imposed a blockade on Ukrainian cereals. Chad, which has experienced numerous armed conflicts on its territory since its independence from France in 1960, is the third least developed country in the world according to the UN.