Dasin Hausa: the dam Nigeria has waited more than 40 years to build

Cameroon finished Lagdo in 1982. Nigeria is still discussing its downstream response. President Tinubu now has a real chance to close out one of the country’s longest-running infrastructure failures.

By Otunba (Dr) Abdulfalil Abayomi Odunowo

Every rainy season, Nigeria goes through the same grim cycle. The rains deepen. Rivers swell. Communities slip beneath the water. Farmland is lost. Roads and bridges give way. Families are displaced. Agencies issue alerts. Emergency teams distribute relief.

Then the floodwaters retreat. We count the dead, vow that lessons have been learned, and wait, once again, for the next season. At the heart of this yearly national tragedy sits a question Nigeria has dodged for more than four decades: what became of the Dasin Hausa dam?

Cameroon built the Lagdo dam on the Benue river system between 1977 and 1982. The multipurpose project, built largely by Chinese contractors, produces roughly 72 MW for northern Cameroon and irrigates about 15,000 hectares. Its reservoir covers hundreds of square kilometres.

At roughly the same period, Nigeria planned a complementary multipurpose reservoir at Dasin Hausa in Fufore local government area of Adamawa state, near Dasin village. Feasibility and design work started in the early 1980s. Contemporary reports point to an understanding that Nigeria would build a buffer, or “shock-absorber,” dam to manage releases from Lagdo and cut flooding along the Benue system.

The logic was simple enough. Water moving through the Benue could be controlled before travelling deeper into Nigeria. Rather than arriving mainly as a flood threat, part of that volume could be stored for irrigation, power generation and broader economic use. Early projections for Dasin Hausa repeatedly pointed to around 300 MW of hydropower, though some later figures cited 138 MW, alongside irrigation potential of roughly 150,000 hectares across Adamawa, Taraba and Benue states, enough, by those estimates, to support hundreds of thousands of tonnes of crops and jobs for tens of thousands of families. Navigability on the Benue was also expected to improve.

Cameroon completed Lagdo. Nigeria never built Dasin Hausa. More than 40 years on, the conversation is still going. That should worry every Nigerian.

There’s a temptation, whenever this issue returns to public debate, to turn it into a political cudgel. That would be the wrong move. Official records and statements from successive water resources officials show the project was conceived and designed in the early 1980s, revisited again and again across administrations, and still left undone. Design work moved forward at some points, only to stall because of funding problems, bureaucratic inertia and shifting priorities.

A former minister once pointed to concerns about the quality of earlier feasibility studies as a reason for pausing aspects of the work in the mid-2010s. Lawmakers have repeatedly demanded action, including motions in the House of Representatives after major floods. Studies and designs have been updated; the Nigeria Hydrological Services Agency confirmed in 2023 that the work had been completed and was awaiting the next steps. The dam itself, though, remains unbuilt.

This isn’t the failure of one president alone. It’s an institutional failure, stretching across both military and civilian governments. And that, arguably, is exactly why the present administration has a chance to bring it to an end.

It would be scientifically careless to claim that every major Nigerian flood begins in Cameroon or that Dasin Hausa would somehow end flooding altogether. Extreme rainfall, poor urban drainage, building on floodplains, blocked waterways, weak storm-water infrastructure, deforestation and climate variability all matter, and they matter a great deal.

Federal officials have repeatedly said Lagdo’s contribution is limited. Former water resources minister Suleiman Adamu put its share at roughly 1 per cent of national flooding, with the overwhelming majority driven by domestic rainfall and internal river systems. Other assessments have placed the figure higher in specific Benue-basin events, but the broad picture remains the same: Lagdo is not the main driver of nationwide flooding. The hydrological services agency has also clarified that particular episodes were caused by localised heavy rain, not Lagdo releases.

Still, the human and economic cost is brutal. The 2012 floods killed around 363 people, displaced more than two million and caused losses measured in billions of dollars. The 2022 floods affected between 4.4 and 4.9 million people and displaced more than two million. In 2024, the National Emergency Management Agency reported more than 1,200 deaths, over 1.2 million displaced and extensive farmland losses. These disasters impose recurring costs in the billions, while relief keeps swallowing resources that could have gone into prevention.

Dasin Hausa is not a silver bullet. But the sheer scale of the damage is no excuse for failing to build strategic water-management infrastructure. When Lagdo next has to make a significant release for safety or operational reasons, should Nigeria wait until the water is already nearing vulnerable communities before suddenly remembering the project again?

Nigeria has spent far too long treating floodwater only as disaster. Yet the same volumes that destroy farmland can irrigate hundreds of thousands of hectares. The same water that sweeps away communities can generate electricity and sustain agriculture through the dry season. One hundred and fifty thousand hectares of properly irrigated land in northern Nigeria would support rice, maize, vegetables, livestock feed, agro-processing, jobs, food security and export potential. Additional reliable hydropower would also strengthen a national grid that still struggles with both capacity and reliability. Dasin Hausa should be developed as an economic corridor, not just a dam.

What’s required is bigger than a single structure. A national Benue river flood-control, irrigation and hydropower programme, with Dasin Hausa as its flagship, should bring together strategically located reservoirs, modern hydrological monitoring, real-time water-level data exchange with Cameroon, irrigation networks, hydropower, dykes and levees, drainage improvement, floodplain mapping, early-warning systems, evacuation corridors and firm enforcement against construction that blocks natural waterways. Serious countries manage river systems through engineering, planning, data, infrastructure, maintenance and, above all, continuity of policy, not through emergency relief alone.

Nigeria’s deeper problem is continuity. Governments announce projects; successors shift priorities; consultants are appointed; new studies are commissioned; designs are revised; committees are formed; reports are written; budgets allocate funds; another administration arrives, and the cycle starts all over again. Population grows, infrastructure decays and the original problem becomes even more expensive. Dasin Hausa is, in many ways, a near-perfect case study of this national pattern. It has appeared in appropriations, feasibility updates, legislative motions and public statements for decades, yet it still hasn’t been built. Infrastructure doesn’t recognise political parties. A dam started under one government still protects citizens under the next. Development demands institutional memory.

There has been some encouraging recent movement. In 2023, the hydrological services agency confirmed that study and design work had been completed. Under the current administration, steps have moved forward through a public-private partnership route. In 2025, the Infrastructure Concession Regulatory Commission held meetings with the federal ministry of water resources and private partners, including Mainstream Energy Solutions, to speed up the project. Officials have described a scheme generating more than 300 MW, irrigating over 150,000 hectares and acting as a buffer against Lagdo-related releases. The minister of water resources and sanitation, Prof Joseph Utsev, has identified Dasin Hausa as a priority, confirmed the appointment of a transactional adviser and linked it to flood control, irrigation and food security under the Renewed Hope agenda.

Announcements are welcome. After more than forty years, however, Nigerians need dates, numbers and milestones. The administration should publish a Dasin Hausa project delivery roadmap laying out estimated cost, final technical configuration, reservoir capacity, power potential, irrigation coverage, environmental and social implications, financing structure, any PPP arrangements, land and compensation requirements, procurement timetable, construction start date and, above all, completion date. Progress should be reported every quarter.

Nigeria has a habit of pouring money into disasters after they happen rather than into infrastructure that can reduce the damage beforehand. Relief, reconstruction of roads and bridges, lost harvests, damaged schools and hospitals, collapsed businesses and displaced families all impose a cumulative toll that makes the cost of delay painfully clear. Prevention won’t eliminate every flood. But reducing severity is, by itself, a significant economic return.

This should not degenerate into another partisan shouting match. A project left unresolved for more than four decades carries responsibility across administrations. President Tinubu did not create the problem. History will judge whether he inherited it and passed it on, or inherited it and solved it. The significance of a president being able to say that, after more than forty years of discussion, the dam was finally built would be substantial.

For years, attention has centred on Cameroon’s releases. A sovereign state will manage infrastructure on its own territory according to operational and safety needs, subject to international cooperation and downstream obligations. Notices have been given at times, and bilateral channels do exist, though coordination hasn’t always been seamless. Recent Cameroonian interest in transboundary impact studies underlines the need for rigorous environmental and social assessment. But the more pressing question for Nigeria is why it has remained so exposed downstream despite knowing the risk for decades. Cameroon finished Lagdo in 1982. That cannot be changed. What exists on the Nigerian side of the border can.

The studies and design are said to be complete. A transactional adviser has been engaged, and PPP discussions are under way. The next steps are financing, procurement and construction. If modern hydrological and environmental work shows the original concept needs adjustment, adjust it. If complementary structures are needed, build them. If a transparent PPP can speed delivery without placing an unreasonable burden, then structure it that way. But Nigeria must stop studying the problem indefinitely.

Nigeria cannot keep spending vast resources responding to predictable disasters while postponing the infrastructure designed to reduce their impact. The water that floods farms should irrigate them. The water that threatens communities should generate electricity. The water feared every rainy season should contribute to food security and prosperity.

After more than four decades, Dasin Hausa should stop being another monument to the country’s inability to sustain continuity in public policy. Publish the engineering plan, the financing plan, the start date and the completion deadline. Then build it.

The best time to prepare for the next flood is not when a gate opens upstream, when the Benue begins to rise, or when communities are already underwater. The time is now.

Otunba (Dr) Abdulfalil Abayomi Odunowo is national chairman of the Asiwaju Ahmed Tinubu Support Group. (AATSG)
Monday 31st August 2026.