With the elephant routes cutting through the larger section of the local area, the wild beasts migrating from Cameroon Lagdo Dam shores to Lake Chad every farming season feast on the major volume of the farm produce of the majority of the communities there.
This year, the majority of the LGA was cut off from the rest of the state by the perennial flooding caused by discharge from the Cameroon Dam, preventing residents from accessing other parts of the state for necessities.
These double tragedies have plunged the Kala-Balge communities into debilitating hardships, having lost their means of livelihood.
Consequently, Zulum, who could only access the LGA by helicopter, rushed to Rann, the headquarters of the LGA where he coordinated the distribution of N100m to the over 10,000 families.
The beneficiaries included male heads of households, vulnerable women and housewives who received N10,000 cash each.
“We are here in Rann, headquarters of Kala-Balge, mainly to provide cash support to this community that was cut off from the rest of the country for the last 6 months as a result of flooding,” Zulum said.
The governor was silent on the havoc wreaked by the elephants. But an anonymous government official told The PUNCH that Zulum rushed to Kala-Balge “to provide succour to the communities mainly for the loss of their farm produce to the migrating elephants.”
However, the spokesman for the Kala-Balge communities, Prof. Mohammed Abba Jimme of the University of Maiduguri Center for Arid Zone Studies, described the farm produce loss as “unquantifiable.”
He told The PUNCH, “The entire local government area has virtually lost all its food this year to the elephants.”
He said he is compiling a comprehensive list of farmers whose farm produce was destroyed by the wild beasts to pursue compensation for them.
