Makurdi - Relief materials donated for flood victims in Benue were on Wednesday burnt by fire at the Local Government Education Authority Primary School Wurukum, in Makurdi.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the materials were donations from corporate organisations, government and private individuals.
NAN also reports that displaced persons from the state were yet to receive their shares of the N500 million grant from the Federal Government while some were yet to obtain the materials.
Confirming the incidence, the Executive Secretary of the State Emergency Management Agency, Mr Adikpo Agbatse, said the entire materials meant for the victims were destroyed in the fire.
``Nothing was taken from the place, everything kept in the store was destroyed by the fire.''
He, however, declined to give the financial value of the materials but NAN gathered that the items included bags of rice, millet, corn, cartons of Indomie noodles, mattresses, mats and blankets.
The Assistant Head Master of the school, Mr Justin Damsa, who witnessed the inferno, recalled seeing billows of smoke that was later followed by the fire in two classrooms.
``I was in one of the classes late in the evening supervising renovation work in the school when the fire broke out.
``By this time there was nothing anybody could do since the fire had engulfed the entire building.
``The intervention of the fire service came too late; by this time, there was nothing anybody could do.''
A NAN correspondent who visited the scene reports that villagers scavenged the remnants of the burnt materials.
Some of them picked burnt mattresses, blankets while others took away iron window frames.
A cross section of them said ``since the government did not give them to us, we will pack them now that they are destroyed''.
NAN