When the Gummi Flood Took Everything, Senator Yari Helped My Family Begin Again
- Senator Abdulaziz Yari's immediate aid transformed despair into hope for flood victims in Gummi
- Relief efforts included food, mattresses, and a commitment to rebuild homes with better standards
- Leadership reflects compassion and shared responsibility in rebuilding lives after disasters
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Exactly two years ago, my family stood outside what used to be our home in Gummi. The rain had stopped, but the destruction had not. Hours of relentless flooding had swept through our community, reducing houses to rubble and washing away the possessions that families had spent decades building. Neighbours searched frantically for one another, mothers held tightly to their children, and fathers stood silently before collapsed walls, wondering how they would ever begin again. My father's house was one of many destroyed that day.
For families like mine, the flood was more than a natural disaster. It was the day certainty disappeared. Overnight, the questions that mattered were no longer about work, school or tomorrow's plans. They were about survival. Where would we sleep? How would we eat? Who would remember us once the television cameras left and the headlines moved on? The answer came sooner than we expected. When Senator Abdulaziz Yari arrived in Gummi, he did not come merely to sympathise with victims or make promises that would be forgotten within days.
Source: Original
He came with help that he personally funded. Using his own resources, he delivered fifteen trucks loaded with rice, maize and millet to families devastated by the floods.
He also provided five thousand mattresses and ten thousand blankets for displaced victims. Those were not government supplies arriving through official channels months later. They were the personal intervention of a man who chose to act immediately when thousands of strangers needed help the most. People often speak about those figures because they are remarkable. Fifteen trucks of food. Five thousand mattresses. Ten thousand blankets. Yet numbers alone cannot explain what they meant to families like mine.
That food became our breakfast and our dinner during weeks when we had no certainty about tomorrow. It gave my parents the breathing room to think about rebuilding instead of worrying about how to feed their children. In moments of disaster, relief is more than charity. It is the bridge between despair and hope. What touched me even more was that Senator Yari did not treat the donation as the end of his responsibility.
He announced that the relief materials were only the beginning. He established a process to assess the full extent of the destruction and committed his own resources to rebuilding homes that had been washed away. He insisted that reconstruction should be done with stronger materials and proper engineering standards so that families would not simply return to the same vulnerability they had lived with before.
That decision told us something profound: he was not interested only in helping us survive the disaster. He wanted to help us recover from it. While the rebuilding was underway, my family temporarily relocated to stay with relatives in a neighbouring state. Leaving home was heartbreaking, but we left with something many other victims of disasters never receive: the confidence that someone had not forgotten us. We knew that work was continuing back home and that our community had not been abandoned to its fate. When we eventually returned to Gummi, we did not return to the broken walls the flood had left behind. We returned to a home.
For my father, it meant recovering his dignity after months of uncertainty. For my mother, it meant having her kitchen again. For my younger siblings, it meant sleeping in their own rooms instead of wondering where we would spend another night. For me, it was a reminder that leadership is measured not only by the offices people hold or the speeches they deliver, but by the lives they quietly help rebuild when no one is watching.
That experience also changed the way I think about President Bola Ahmed Tinubu's Renewed Hope Agenda. Too often, people speak about it as though it is the responsibility of government alone. I do not believe that anymore. Real hope cannot be renewed by one person, one institution or one level of government. It requires everyone. Government has its role to play. The private sector has its own responsibility. Individuals who have been blessed with resources also have a duty to serve. When people like Senator Abdulaziz Yari choose to use their personal resources to lift others in their moment of greatest need, they demonstrate that nation-building is a shared responsibility.
That is how hope becomes more than a slogan. It becomes something people can actually experience. Today, when I hear Senator Abdulaziz Yari's name, I do not first think about politics. I remember the fifteen trucks that arrived when families had nothing, the blankets spread across the floors where children finally slept, the food that sustained us through the hardest weeks of our lives, and the day my father no longer had to explain to his children why they no longer had a home. Those are the memories that remain with me.
Many people will remember the 2024 Gummi floods for the devastation they caused. My family will remember them for something else. We will remember that when everything we owned disappeared beneath the water, one man chose to use his personal resources to stand with complete strangers. His intervention did not simply rebuild our house. It restored our confidence that compassion still exists, that leadership can still be personal, and that even after the darkest storms, hope can be rebuilt, one family at a time. -Nafisa is a student of Bayero University, Kano. A beneficiary of Senator Yari’s scholarship for students from North-West Nigeria.
Source: Legit.ng
