DAKAR (AlertNet) - "Welcome to hell, President." That was the banner headline of the Senegalese newspaper L'Observateur this week, ahead of the anticipated return of President Abdoulaye Wade from his holiday in Europe.

The hell the paper referred to was Senegal, where rainfall had flooded 30,000 homes in the outskirts of the capital Dakar and two other towns. Persistent power cuts sparked protests across the country while Wade holidayed in Switzerland and France.

"We are already dead and nothing matters to us. We are caught between power cuts, floods and insecurity," the paper quoted a resident of Pikine one of the flooded suburbs of Dakar.

Angry youths in the impoverished suburbs regularly flooded by heavy rainfall, barricaded roads, burnt used tyres and smashed the windscreen of a police vehicle on Wednesday in protest against what they perceived as a slow response to their plight by the government.

That reflects the challenges West African governments face each year as seasonal rains trigger landslides and floods that kill and displace some of the poorest populations living in vulnerable areas on the outskirts of congested cities.

In 2007, flooding in West Africa killed 300 and displaced over 800,000 more - the worst flooding in recent years.

Many of the vulnerable live on unsafe ground. The suburbs of Dakar, home to about 1 million people, should never have been inhabited because it was swampland dried by years of drought, according to experts.

"Water oozes naturally from the earth, then there is waste water from human settlement and rainfall all of which converge in the rainy season to create an explosion of floods, cholera and malaria," Libasse Hanne a geographer and municipal councillor told AlertNet.

And so, governments in the region which hosts 13 of the world's least developed countries according to the United Nations are forced to dip into their cash strapped economies for disaster management funds.

The government of Senegal announced plans to put in over $4 million to handle the floods and Sierra Leone, where seven people died from mudslides and floods in August, is about to set up a national emergency fund to manage the recurrent disasters.

"We are looking at launching the fund in early September. We are still looking at how much money to put into that and how best that programme is to work," said Mary Mye-Kamara, director of disaster management in Sierra Leone's Office of National Security.

Further along the African coast, Benin declared a state of emergency in July. It allocates about $1 million each year for flood relief work.

But these government funds are often insufficient and international donors have to help. In August, the International Federation of the Red Cross launched a preliminary emergency appeal for $850,000 to help 25,000 people in West and Central Africa.

One drastic solution is to relocate people but this is expensive as it requires constructing new homes for thousands of people.

"The government and the local councils need to really take their jobs seriously," said Alfred Sohou, Benin's director for civil protection and disaster prevention.

"We should not wait for the people to settle before thinking about town planning and drainage systems."

For a factbox on flooding in West Africa please click here.

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