Coordinating Multi-Hazard Emergencies in Nigeria's Federal System through the 2023 Adamawa Flood Response

Abstract

The 2023 Adamawa flash-flood response was state-led in documented practice. The State Emergency Management Agency (SEMA) convened weekly coordination, co-produced the rapid assessment and served as the reference point for figures, while federal and humanitarian actors contributed river monitoring, alerting, contingency stocks held in government warehouses and assessment support. The largest weaknesses lay at the interfaces between these actors. Three organisations published impact figures that differ by a factor of about five for displacement; flooding was recorded as beginning two days before the formal alert despite weeks of monitored dam releases; and no measurable alert or escalation threshold, consolidated cross-sector prioritisation or review mechanism is visible in the record. Concurrent displacement, cholera and diphtheria responses ran through separate leadership channels with no documented link to the flood structure. These findings come from a structured documentary analysis of fifteen primary and grey documents dated no later than 2023, including statutes, national frameworks, situation reports, a displacement tracking flash report and a sector incident report, coded across five coordination functions and three institutional interfaces and interpreted against the scholarly literature on crisis coordination and multilevel governance. The findings are condensed into the Connected Federalism Coordination Framework, a case-derived diagnostic checklist of verifiable indicators that requires testing in further cases. Federalism becomes an operational asset when authority, information and resources are deliberately connected before a crisis occurs.