ENVIRONMENT-KENYA: First Lake Flood in Decades Threatens Thousands

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Judith Achieng'

NAIROBI, May 21 1998 (IPS) - Each year, people who live around Africa’s largest freshwater lake suffer flood-related problems but nothing like those Lake Victoria now threatens to unleash on them.

After a month of heavy rains in much of East Africa, newspapers here have reported that Lake Victoria has burst its banks for the first time since 1960, spilling into neighbouring plateaux and destroying farms and homes.

The 68,000-sq.km lake — the world’s second largest — is shared by Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. Kenya has about six percent of its 2,760 cubic kilometres of water, while Tanzania has 49 percent and Uganda 45 percent.

Lake Victoria supports about 25 million people, including an estimated 10 million in Kenya, where local leaders have appealed for disaster relief for more than 2,000 families already forced out of their homes as the waters keep rising. “It is a disaster of untold proportions waiting to happen,” said Shem Ochuodho, a politician in the area.

Kenya’s government has said it has outlined plans to evacuate people threatened by the flood, which has reportedly affected the entire shoreline on the Kenyan side of the lake, forcing the suspension of transport by road and railway. The water has also been seeping into houses in Kisumu, the largest city on the Kenyan shore.

Also affected are fishermen who derive their livelihood from the lake. Officials of a fishing co-operative based in Kisumu town, some 400 km from here, were quoted as saying vehicles were unable to reach the beach where the fish is usually loaded for transportation to other towns such as Nairobi and Mombasa.

In Nairobi traders says the fish supply has been affected. “We are getting litle fish at high cost,” complained Millicent Auma, a fish vendor here.

Against this background, the UN Environmental Programme (UNEP) whose fifth governing council — which is in session here — has highlighted the need to outline mechanisms to counter disasters like the Lake Victoria flood and recent forest fires in Indonesia, both associated with the El Nino phenomenon.

“There is an urgent need for an early warning mechanism and emergency response capacity to deal with environmental disasters,” said Klaus Toepfer, UNEP’s executive director.

One explanation experts have advanced for the flooding is the constant interference of water outlets by damming, leading to silt deposits in the shallow sections of the lake.

Others like William Saina, an agricultural and water expert here, said the water levels rose as a result of siltation stemming from the blockage of river deltas by the water hyacinth, a weed covering large tracts of the lake’s surface.

“The blockage has forced silt deposits in the shallow sections of the lake, damming the rivers and causing floods,” the Daily Nation quoted him as saying.

Saina’s view was, however, disputed by Geofrey Howard, an International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) expert, who said the rise in the lake’s water levels had more to do with record rainfall since last year in the region, due mainly to El Nino — a warm ocean current that disrupts weather patterns.

“Rainfall increase is the main cause of the flooding if the totals are as high as the 1960 ones,” Howard said. His view is that the water hyacinth should not pose a problem since it absorbs water. In fact, 92 percent of the weed is water, he said.

One newspaper editorial suggested creating more dams, which would take in much of the water released by rivers bursting their banks, but Ochuodho disagrees. “The construction of cataracts and other interferences along the lake’s outlets such as the Nile are the major cause of the crisis in the region,” he charged.

The lake basin is fed by several rivers and streams while it is drained by seven others, including the Nile whose waters are dammed and collected in reservoirs for domestic and farm use in Uganda, Sudan, Ethiopia and Egypt.

Quarrels among the countries that share the Nile and its source, Lake Victoria, have usually revolved around each country not getting enough of their water.