Last week I discussed how interstate responses to the rise of Boko Haram in the Lake Chad basin were instrumental in causing the Lake Chad Basin Crisis. This week I want to elaborate on interstate efforts to manage the Lake - specifically focusing on the Lake Chad Basin Commission (LCBC).
The LCBC was formed in 1964 by Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon, Chad, and to a lesser extent the Central African Republic. Its aim was to enhance co-operation in the management of Lake Chad's resources, explicitly recognising the international status of Lake Chad (Ngatcha, 2009). The LCBC set out regulation for the utilization of water resources and the initiation and co-ordination of projects and settlements of disputes (Musa, 2009).
The decline in the Lake's size and the humanitarian crisis currently ongoing suggests that the LCBC has not been very successful. Ngatcha (2009) argues that a lack of co-ordination, shared vision, and public participation between member states is to blame. Tar & Mustapha (2017), meanwhile, suggest that more decisive in the LCBC's relative failures is the complex and unequal power dynamics and historical animosities between member states.
Inter-basin Water Transfer Projects
One area in which the LCBC does seem to be in agreement on is that sustainable management of the Laker is no longer a feasible endeavour (Musa, 2009), suggesting that the Lake has declined to the point of no return. The LCBC has instead outlined plans to 'save Lake Chad' an ambitious inter basin water transfer schemes. They plan to construct a dam on the Bangui river and divert the water flow to the Chad Basin (see figure 1). The scheme is designed to restore the lake to 'normal levels' (Musa, 2009) and also has a number of 'secondary' aims (Musa, 2009):
- To facilitate the navigation and transportation of goods as well as tourism.
- To generate 700MW of electricity through hydropower.
- To clear the region of its landlocked nature, and achieve regional economic integration, co-operation and security.
- To act as a catalyst for the re-establishment of fishery and irrigation activities.
What 'normal levels' mean in relation to a Lake that is extremely variable in size is unclear. Whether 'normal' denotes the 8500BP 'Mega Lake Chad' that was 340,000km3 in size, or its complete disappearance the 15th century (
Goni et al., 2015), or the extent it was at in the 1960s, what is clear is that the 'secondary' reasons for embarking on the scheme are probably more 'primary' than they suppose. The transfer system would perhaps allow riparian states to fill up the dams they could never fill and enlarge their irrigation programs.
Ultimately, the LCBC member states' attempts to install modern forms of governance and agriculture in a basin characterised by extreme variability have been an abject failure. We have already seen how irrigation infrastructure has had decimated extant forms of agriculture and failed to implement modern techniques. Whereas with these schemes the LCBC member states were competing with each other for Lake Chad's resources, they are now co-operating to find a solution that they think would work for everyone: an inter basin water transfer system.
The interesting question here is why are LCBC members doubling down on irrigation strategies that plainly don't work?
The first and obvious answer is that they have spent lots of time and money on the infrastructures already so probably would like to see them work.
The second answer, perhaps harder to ascertain, cuts right to the heart of the complex interplay between water, politics and development in contemporary Africa: that traditional forms of water management and adaptation, in our case nomadic herding and seasonal fishing that traverses multiple borders, are incongruent with modernised forms of governance, taxation, borders and land rights. If countries like those of the LCBC want to be 'developed', if they want to receive loans and garner respect globally, they have to transform landscapes into productive, organised and stable machines, they have to enforce and police their borders, and must make their territories uniform and taxable.
How could a farmer who crosses 4 borders each year, doesn't have any land rights, and has no fixed address ever fit into this modern state machine? Obviously they couldn't and yet around Lake Chad this way of life is the dominant one. Yes, the lake has declined, and, yes, the irrigation projects have failed entirely but the crisis is not one of resource scarcity - resource scarcity only really became a problem when Niger and Chad forced thousands of farmers to live in refugee camps. It is instead a political one: traditional forms of living and farming in and around Lake Chad are in crisis against the imposition of modern borders and westernised neoliberal forms of governing. One must cede. What we are witnessing in the Lake Chad Basin Crisis is the transition of the basin into modernity; the slow, painful and violent passing of centuries-old ways of agriculture and water resource management.
Apologies for the long post - but I feel like my whole blog series has been leading up to those final paragraphs!
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