Mariam Mariam
Some of my earliest lessons in geography were taught by my mother and I kept remembering that she would show me a relief map of Nigeria with various features: the rivers, the plateau, and of course, the majestic Lake Chad. I must have been between the ages of seven and eight, and in the fanciful imagination of a growing child, the Lake Chad sat on the head of Nigeria, like a cap, in the same way that I used to imagine at the same age, that on the surface of the full moon when I looked up at night, was a woman that was breast feeding a baby! What bliss childhood represented for all of us.
From those early years, I have never lost my fascination with the great waterways of the world, and how they have been at the bases of the growth of civilized human conduct and the ebb and the flow of the cultures of humanity. The River Niger played a very central role in the building of the cultures of the Western Sudan and was a major backdrop against which I formed my consciousness; it is also the same manner that Lake Chad has played a vital role in the cultural development of a very important part of our Sahelian region. My fascination with these bodies of water has not diminished over the years.
A few years ago, while still editing the newspaper, I sent our Bureau Chief in Maiduguri, Abudllahi Bego, to travel to N’Djamena, the location of the Headquarters of the Lake Chad Basin Commission, as well as to see how the various communities on the shores of the lake have been coping with shrinking waters of the lake and the effect that was having on the social and economic lives of the peoples of the region.We were interested in the effort that was on the drawing board to divert water from a river in the Central Africa Republic to Lake Chad, but which has not really taken off despite its importance to the lives of the people and the ecosystem of the lake area.
Let me confess that we published Bego’s reports and moved on to other things, with the Lake Chad and its peoples’ plight receeding into the background, until when Nigeria had to hand over some 33 or so villages to Cmeroun as part of implementation of the judgement of the International Court of Justice. It took the 2006 Human Development Report of the United Nations Development Programme(UNDP), TITLED “Beyond Scarcity:
Power, Poverty and the Global Water Crisis”, for me to reexamine issues related to the problem of Lake Chad.
The Human Development Report points out that our world faces a major crisis in water and sanitation, with this crisis in water and sanitation, with this crisis being principally a crisis of the poor. “Almost two in three people lacking access to clean water survive on less than $2 a day, with one with one in three living on less than $1 a day”. More than 660 million people without sanitation live on less than $2 a day, and more than 385 million on less than $1 a day, according to the 2006 report. It went further to state that such facts have important public policy implication, especially in an age of neo-liberal capitalist triumphalism, when privatization of everything under the sun is being pushed down the throats of countries around the world, the report emphatically that “while the private sector may have a role to play in delivery, public financing holds the key to overcoming deficits in water and sanitation”.
But what caught my attention the most in the 2006 report, was the section which talked about the mismanagement of international water basins and the threat that poses to human security in a very direct way. It points out that shrinking lakes and dying rivers affect livelihoods in agriculture and fisheries, while deteriorating water quality “has harmful consequences for health, and unpredictable disruptions in water flows can exacerbate the effects of droughts and flood”. Furthermore, it says that some of the world’s most visible environmental disasters bear testimony to the human development cost of noncooperation in trans-boundary water management. To illustrate the point, the Human Development Report, used our Lake Chad.
“Today the lake is one- tenth the size it was 40 years ago. Filed rains and drought have been major factors but so has human agency. Between 1996 and 1975, when the lake shrank by a third, low rainfall was almost entirely to blame. But between 1983 and 1994 irrigation demands quadrupled, rapidly depleting an already shrinking resource and setting in train rapid losses of water”. The countries of the Lake Chad basin have not been cooperated as strongly as they should, and environmental decline and erosion of livelihoods and productive potential have gone hand in hand. Over fishing of the lake has become instituted. With scant regard to rules meant to regulate use among Chad, Cameroon, Nigeria and Niger.
“Badly planned irrigation projects have also contributed to the crisis. Dams on the Hadejia River in Nigeria have threatened down stream communities dependent on fishing, grazing and flood recession farming, and agreements to guarantee water flows have lagged in implementation. The Komadougou- Yobe River system shared by Niger and Nigeria used to contribute 7 cubic kilometers to Lake Chad. Today, with water impounde in reservoirs, the system provides less than half a cubic kilometer, severally affecting the northern part of the lake basin. Elsewhere, dykes built in the late 1970s on the Logone River in Cameroon disrupted small farmer’s livelihoods in the down stream wetlands: within two decades cotton yields had fallen by a third and rice yields by three- fourths”.
“ The environmental consequences of unsustainable water use can eventually feed back to disrupt infrastructure investments. The Southern Chad Irrigation project, an ambitious scheme started in 1974, barely accomplished a tenth of its target of irrigating 67,000 hectares in Nigeria. Over time, as water flows in the rivers declined, the drying canals became clogged with typha australis plants, the preferred nesting ground for quelea, a bird that now destroys vast quantities of rice and other grain crops. As the lake shrank competition intensified between nomadic herders and settled farmers, large scale and small scale users and upstream and downstream communities. Riparian communities have relocated closer to the water crossing areas formerly covered by the lake where national boundaries were marked, leading to further territorial disputes”.
The 2006 UNDP Human Development Report, from which I have copiously quoted above, got me thinking about the truly human disasters that unfold all around us, but which we might be unaware of, or are oblivious to, lost as we are in our day to day pursuits, often far away in political capitals of our countries. The political elite is not in touch with the real, lived experiences of the people over whom they preside, and have not the intellectual sensitivity nor the sense of history which could allow them to understand the small points of existence that really add up to produce the broad canvass of human experience. Take Nigeria for example; the political elite is locked in its intrigues about capturing power in Abuja, and the fate of the over 20million people of the Lake Chad and such communities as the Niger Delta, which will eventually underscore the humanization of our politics and society.
The Lake Chad is the fourth largest lake in the world. It is, or used to be one of the most important wetlands on the African continent, and is/ was said to be home of 120 species of fish and at least that many species of birds. By 2003, it covered only1350 square kilometers, down from 25,000square kilometers in 1963. The Lake Chad has always fluctuated from year to year, and according to some statistics, in 1870, its maximum area was 28,000 square kilometers, which dropped to 12,700 in 1908. In the 1940s and 1950s, it remained small but it then grew again to 26,000 square kilometers in 1963. But the drought of the late 1960s and early 1970s and the mid 1980s caused the lake to shrink again.
The University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA, researchers, Michael Coe and Jonathan Foley, also underlined the fact of the decline of the lake, saying that it went down from 25,000 square kilometers to 1,500 square kilometers between 1966 and 1997. Some villages do not have a border with Lake Chad anymore; an example is the N’guigmi, 1,500km from Niamey, the capital of Niger which used to be a lake side town up to about twenty-five years ago but is now 100 kilometres from Lake Chad’s shore. The Nigerian wildlife consultant, Emmanuel Asuquo-Obot, did a report , which said that failed rains and droughts between 1992 and 1994, the diversions of water from River Chari to irrigation projects and the construction of dams on the Hadejia and Jamaa’re rivers in Nigeria are among factors that hastened the shrinking of the lake. That in turn led to the loss of plant and animal habitats. Asuquo-Obot said that animal populations have plummeted and many large mammals such as giraffes, stripped hyenas, western kob, bush buck and sitatunga are considered to be extinct in the area around the lake.
Similarly, agriculture has become precarious while surface water for fishing has decreased, leading to changes of fishing methods and fishing diversity has reduced. Irrigation is another factor that has hastened the drying up of the lake and the dropping of water levels in turn affected irrigation projects. Asuquo- Obot said that a case in point is the Sothern Chad Irrigation Project (SCIP) that we have already reported in this write up. Its goal was to irrigate 67,000 hectares, but as water levels in the lake fell in the late 1980s, no irrigation could take place. The SCIP had unintended spin offs: its dried up canals have been taken over by the typha australis plant that can survive long spells. The plant happens to be the preferred nesting ground of the quelae bird, the avian world’s equivalent of the locust.
Quelea birds put additional pressure on the already unstable livelihood systems of the lake basin. The regular loss of rice and the other grain crops to the large flocks of quelea birds led to a large scale spraying of the area with chemical control agents, whose long term effects on other life forms have not been determined. In addition to fishermen and farmers, pastoral communities have also been affected by the recession of the lake, since pasture has become scarce around it. Cattle herders have been burning the sparse, coarse vegetation that is left in the hope that new plant life will sprout and provide a more palatable diet for their livestock. The process loosens the dry soil and makes it more susceptible to erosion.
According to another study done by Mike Adewale, a Nigerian agricultural economist, as the lake areas dry up, farmers and cattle herders have had to move southwards towards greener areas, where they end up competing with host communities. This has led to some of the conflicts between herders and farming communities reported in recent years in the north eastern part of Nigeria. He further reported that some of the farmers forced to migrate from Lake Chad area have gone to cities as far as Lagos, where they take up menial jobs or swell the ranks of the urban lumpen jobless.
The Lake Chad is shared by Chad, Cameroon, Nigeria, Niger and the Central African Republic (CAR). Its basin extends over 967,000 square kilometers, and is home to about twenty million people:11.7 million Nigerians, 5 million Chadians, 2.5 million Cmeroonians, 634,000 Central Africans and 193,000 Nigeriens. It is for the sake of these African people that some effort has been made, in a half-hearted manner, to launch a replenishment intiative to help save the lake. It is the first of its kind in Africa and known as “project d’Approvisionement du Lac Tchad (Lake Chad Replenishment Project)”, it entailed damming the Oubangui river at Palambo, CAR, and channeling some of its water through a navigable channel to Lake Chad. It is expected that the project would provide the opportunity to regenerate the ecosystem, rehabilitate the lake, reconstitute the biodiversity and safeguard the lake for its people, the African continent and humanity.
Movement has been slow in efforts to finance the start of the feasibility study to determine the economic, social and environmental impacts of the project to divert water from the CAR to the Lake Chad. But the lake is dying and the livelihood of millions of people is in jeopardy along with unique cultures that evolved around the lake over millennia. The political elite in our countries are locked in the intrigues of power, oblivious of the suffering which the plight of Lake Chad typifies. Yet I hope that we can nudge the decision makers to move fast, so as to urgently save a very majestic gift of nature , the Lake Chad. That way, I can also reclaim my childhood imagery: the lake which perches on the head of Nigeria like a cap. Please let us save the Lake Chad form death.
