-By Abdul Mahmud
Just recently, photos of deep erosion gullies cutting through Auchi began circulating on social media. They are terrifying images. Stark. Stark enough to jar the conscience of any public official in Edo State with an ounce of duty. But, unsurprisingly, they haven’t. Auchi, the northern Edo town, one of the most important towns of the Afemai people, which now wears the look of a town falling into itself, is being eaten alive. Its red earth is pockmarked by holes and yawning gullies that stretch for metres. Gullies that now resemble open graves. Open graves. That is what Auchi’s erosion sites have become; gaping, growing pits that threaten lives, homes, memories. They spread like a slow poison. They don’t stop. They have no boundaries. They creep into compounds, under buildings, across streets. They swallow the land. They take trees, people, homes, hope.
For decades, Auchi has battled the effects of erosion. But what began as seasonal floodwater carving paths across the town has today become a humanitarian and environmental catastrophe. Nature is no longer whispering. It is roaring. Though, Auchi is not an exception. In every part of the world, climate change announces itself in its own voice. Sometimes it is wildfires. Other times, floods. In Auchi, it has taken the form of massive gullies that now disfigure the landscape. While nature raises its voice in fury, tearing through land and life with devastating force, the State and Federal Governments respond with silence, as if deaf to the groaning earth. The Governor of Edo State, rather than confronting the crisis head-on, is busying himself with frivolous ceremonies and jejune receptions for dignitaries inside the Government House; or issuing petty threats to political opponents who decline the summons of protocol. At the federal level, the President and his men are adrift in the sea of re-election calculations, too absorbed in the arithmetic of power to reckon with the crumbling soil beneath their citizens’ feet. The tragedy unfolds, and those entrusted with responsibility look away, either blinded by ambition or numbed by indifference. No State and National Disaster Agencies have made perfunctory visits, at least to take photos and issue hollow promises as they always do.
Meanwhile, the earth keeps shifting beneath Auchi. The people are afraid. And they have every reason to be. Houses now perch on the edge of gullies. Families wake up to discover the land beneath them has vanished. Roads once busy with motorcycles and schoolchildren have disappeared. There is no exaggeration here. What is happening in Auchi is a disaster. One that is both natural and political. Natural because the red Mars-like earth of Auchi is loose, vulnerable, and unable to withstand repeated assault by floodwaters. Political because those charged with protecting communities like Auchi have done nothing. A few interventions have been attempted over the years. But, they are far too little to address the problem. Auchi appears to have been abandoned to its fate. Auchi is what abandonment looks like in a country where the elites fly over disaster zones and do not walk through them. Auchi is a town on nobody’s priority list, rendered voiceless by the geography of power.
But, Auchi matters to me. It always has.
My provenance lies just across the expressway in Sabo, South Ibie clan. A community, once distinct, now inseparable from Auchi by the tides of time and traffic. The expressway from Benin to Abuja slices through both, but geography no longer draws the lines clearly. First-time visitors often ask: where does Auchi end, and where does Sabo begin? No one knows for sure anymore. The land has fused, as memory and place sometimes do. Auchi is woven into the fabric of my life. It is where my story turned the corner. I returned there at sixteen. An abrupt return occasioned by the death of my father. Auchi received my mum, my siblings and I like a relative waiting at the door. It became the ground of my becoming. The streets were my first library. Modest bookshops filled with promise stood proudly from Up-Garage down to the junction of Inu-Umoru Street. They drew me in. That was how I met books. That was how books met me. News vendors became my morning tutors. They stood in front of the old New Nigeria bank building, shouting headlines, turning the heart of the town into a public classroom. I began to see that education did not end in the four walls of a school. The world itself could be a blackboard. It was here, too, in the stirrings of student politics, that the future beckoned. November 1990. Delegates gathered for the NANS Convention at Auchi Polytechnic. The convention was botched by the military dictator, IBB, but something was born. The talk of my candidacy began there, whispered in the corners. Days later, I became President of NANS at the University of Benin. But the idea was seeded there. Auchi also carries grief. Beneath its red earth rests a friend, a brother, a comrade. Professor Abubakar Momoh – one of the finest political economists of his generation. He lived with courage and brilliance. He died with his integrity intact. His memory breathes in the soil of Auchi. Bless his soul. Auchi is not just a town. For me, it is a map of memory. A place of pain and purpose. It is where the past and the future shake hands.
Yet, today, Auchi is being cut in half by gullies.
Whole sections of the town are being disconnected. Roads linking the town’s quarters have become impassable. In some cases, the gullies have reached several metres deep. Some as deep as 25 to 30 feet, making them death traps for children and even adults. It is hard to imagine how a town this important could fall into this level of neglect. But it has. The images don’t lie. Photos show the town being gnawed from the inside. Videos show frightened residents looking at a growing abyss outside their homes. Some tell stories of neighbours who had to flee in the middle of the night when the ground cracked open beneath them. These are not scenes from a disaster movie. They are real. And they are a warning. A warning about what happens when climate change meets government indifference. For years, experts have said that Nigeria is vulnerable to climate disasters. From desertification in the North to rising sea levels in the South. From deadly floods to droughts. Yet, there is still no coordinated climate resilience plan. Auchi is paying the price. The gullies that once began as harmless rills have now turned into fullblown canyons. In some places, these canyons have reached homes, schools, and clinics. The town’s economy will suffer in the future if nothing is done today. No investor will build on land that might vanish. No school can function where access roads have become rivers of mud. No resident can sleep in peace when they fear the next rainfall might bring their house down.
What Auchi needs is not a photo-op by a government delegation. It needs action. Urgent, technical, focused action. There is a National Erosion and Watershed Management Project (NEWMAP). There is a Federal Ministry of Environment. There is a Niger Delta Development Commission. And there are ecological funds. Where are they? What is the use of these institutions if they cannot stop a town from falling into the ground? But, Auchi is not alone. Even my provenance, South Ibie clan, is battling to save itself from the frightening gullies showing up. Other towns in southeastern Nigeria, like Agulu, Nanka, and Oko in Anambra State are facing similar gully erosion disasters. They are crying for attention.
And that raises painful, even haunting, questions: Why are these people being condemned to suffer through neglect? Why does the Edo State government avert its gaze, in particular, as though willful blindness might erase the deepening wounds of the land? Is it that someone in power has shrugged off responsibility, consoling himself with the fatalistic notion that these terrifying gullies are mere acts of God?
There is no sense in which this erosion can be called an act of God. It is the act of a system that looks the other way when danger builds up. It is the act of leadership that plans for ribbon-cutting ceremonies, not for long-term environmental protection. We cannot keep blaming the rain. We must blame our refusal to build drainages. Our failure to regulate construction. Our inability to act before disaster strikes. Every year, government agencies speak about climate change. They sign agreements. They attend international conferences. They talk about emissions and net zero. But in Auchi, and elsewhere, climate change is not a theory. It is a lived reality. It is the sound of the earth caving into itself. The scream of a child falling into a pit. The helplessness of parents watching their compounds dissolve into nothing. We must not allow Auchi to become a town of mourning. We must not let it become a cautionary tale. The time to act is now. Erosion doesn’t wait. Gullies do not pause. They grow. With every rain. Every storm. Every season. The gullies stretch across the land like wandering prophets gone rogue and cast themselves in the image of Diogenes with his flickering lamp, not in search of honest men, but probing endlessly for the next soft earth to devour.
They move with a quiet, deliberate menace, carving their paths deeper into the yielding earth, as though animated by some unspoken philosophy of ruin. They do not rush, but open up slowly, as if conscious of their role in a slow and inevitable undoing. In their wake, they leave haunting images of absence and sad reminders of what once stood with pride and permanence. This is not progress; it is the architecture of decay masquerading as motion. Here, Auchi becomes a palimpsest of vanishing memory, a terrain where grandeur is not merely lost, but dismantled by the hands of water and time. Auchi is the theatre of sheer destruction which echoes the melancholic vision that the 18th century French philosopher, Denis Diderot, once conjured: a world that exists only as the broken remnants of what has been. In this philosophy of ruin, nothing is built; everything is unmade, and the silence that follows speaks louder than any storm.
Erosion is Killing Auchi, one rain at a time.
The people are pleading. They are not asking for miracles. They are asking for attention, for responsibility, for help. We cannot claim to be building a country while allowing its towns to collapse. We cannot talk about development while our earth gives way beneath our feet. Auchi is weeping. It is breaking apart. Will our leaders come to its rescue before it is too late?
