The Federal Ministry of Water Resources plans to construct a new dam on the Benue River to mitigate the effects of flood in the country.
This is contained in a communiqué made available on Monday in Abuja. The statement was an outcome of the Strategic Meeting for Performance and Agenda Setting for the Water Sector held on January 4 and 5.
The objective of the meeting was to review the performance and achievements of the Ministry in 2012 and to set targets for the year 2013. It was also on how to achieve the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) agreed with President Goodluck Jonathan in the performance contract signed with the Minister of Agriculture in August 2012.
According to the communiqué, a Nigerian technical delegation from the ministry was sent to Cameroon for bilateral cooperation and management of trans-boundary water issues including flooding. It said that there was an agreement by the Nigerian and Cameroonians to jointly manage the water releases from the Lagdo Dam and the Lake Nyos in Cameroon.
“The possibility of construction of new Dams in Nigeria on the Benue River as a means of mitigating floods from Benue river system was discussed during the meeting,’’ the communiqué said.
The statement said that the statutory role of the ministry in regards to flood control, channelisation, drainage, hydrological network, monitoring and de-silting of dams (a process of cleaning dams) was also reviewed at the meeting. It noted that all the parastatals and departments of the ministry had satisfactorily utilised the funds made available to them for their project implementation.
“The meeting reviewed all the reports presented by all the Parastatals and Departments and acknowledged their satisfactory performances within the limits of available fund with overall 99.95 per cent fund utilisation of the amounts released.
“All projects appropriated for implementation in 2012 were procured and are at various stages of completion,” the communiqué stated.
NAN
