Chad's capital suffers major floods

Several neighbourhoods of Ndjamena have been flooded out after torrential rain hammered the Chadian capital for more than a week, an AFP journalist saw. 

“N’Djamena is a basin, a large part of the north of the city is under water,” Ali Haroun, mayor of the city, told AFP.

“We have set up water pumping stations,” he said.

“It is very possible that houses collapsed because of the weather,” Haroun said, without giving a toll.

“We put on motorised pumps to drain the water, without success. The houses continue to collapse,” said Armand Mbahnoel, a resident of the seventh district whose house was completely flooded.

“The roads remained impassable and blocked. Water has poured into all the houses in this area, but there has been no collapse of the houses today,” said Mustafa Abagana, who also lives in the area, one of the worst hit by the floods.

The region is regularly hit by floods.

In August 2020, more than 11,500 people were displaced by heavy rains in the Chadian capital.

According to the United Nations, 5.5 million Chadians, around a third of the landlocked central African country’s population, needed “urgent humanitarian assistance” in 2021.

The situation has worsened because of the war in Ukraine, with Ukrainian grain struggling to leave the country for foreign markets.

Chad, which has seen numerous armed conflicts since independence from France in 1960, is the third least developed country in the world according to the UN.