Fishing boats, Lake Chad. Credit: Mustapha Muhammad/IPS

By External Source
YOLA, Nigeria , Oct 2 2020 (IPS)

Lake Chad is an extremely shallow water body in the Sahel. It was once the world’s sixth largest inland water body with an open water area of 25,000 km2 in the 1960s, it shrunk dramatically at the beginning of the 1970s and reduced to less than 2,000 km2 during the 1980s, decreasing by more than 90% its area. It is one of the largest lakes in Africa. It is an endorheic lake – meaning that it doesn’t drain towards the ocean.

Its origin is unknown but it is believed to be a remnant of a former inland sea. It doesn’t drain into the ocean but it has shrunk by over 90% since the 1960s due to climate change, an increase in the population and unplanned irrigation. Given the rate at which the lake is disappearing, in less than a decade it may cease to be.

The lake is central to regional stability. To achieve peace, countries should focus on reviving the water body rather than on military activities

Four countries share borders within the water body – Nigeria, Chad, Niger and Cameroon – and have formed a political union, the Lake Chad Basin Countries. Other countries indirectly connected to the lake are Algeria, Libya, Central African Republic and Sudan. Over 30 million people live around the lake.

For them, it’s a source of freshwater for drinking, sanitation and irrigation. It supports the livelihoods of farmers, pastoralists, hunters and fishermen.

The Lake Chad region, however, is one of the most unstable in the world. According to the 2020 Global Terrorism Index report, countries of the region are among the 10 least peaceful countries in Africa.

Our research focused on how the drying of this important water body contributes to the instability in the region.

We collected data from interviews with respondents from Lac Region in Chad, Far North Region in Cameroon, Diffa Region in Niger Republic and the North East geopolitical zone in Nigeria. These regions of the Lake Chad Basin Commission countries compose the Chad Basin Region. We also collected data from news reports.

The study found that loss of livelihoods has promoted criminality, easy recruitment by terrorist groups, and migration to urban centres. This has also led to violence and crime in cities and towns. Management of the shrinking lake has caused conflicts among the states that depend on it and this has made it more difficult for them to collectively fight insecurity in the region.

The lake is central to regional stability. To achieve peace, countries should focus on reviving the water body rather than on military activities.

Impact on livelihoods

The immediate impact of the drying of Lake Chad is loss of livelihoods.

One of the respondents said in an interview that:

Many years back, this water used to be what we depend on for farming, fishing and herding. Since the water has dried up, sustaining our livelihoods has become so hard. We can hardly farm now and we record regular death of our livestock because of lack of fodder and water to fatten them. Because of this, most people have abandoned farming, fishing and livestock rearing because they are no longer sustainable in this area.

Loss of the traditional means of livelihood leads to widespread poverty and food insecurity. A 2017 report estimated there were about 10.7 million inhabitants of Lake Chad Region in need of humanitarian services.

Impact on regional stability

The shrinking of the lake contributes to regional instability in four ways. First, some of the region’s people have taken to criminal activities for survival. One of the major criminal activities in the area is cattle rustling.

Reports have pointed to rising incidence of cattle rustling in the region. It’s easy to move cattle over the country borders in the area to evade arrest. Contemporary rustling has been associated with Boko Haram who resort to cattle rustling as additional means of raising fund in support of their operations. Boko Haram has become a serious security problem in the Lake Chad region.

Most of the response to the threat of the group has been military. For example, from 2009 to 2018, Nigeria’s defence budget totalled nearly $21 billion with a substantial part going towards the fight against Boko Haram.

Further, Boko Haram has capitalised on the loss of livelihoods and economic woes to recruit people into its ranks. It either appeals to the poor ideologically or directly uses economic incentives.

Interviews with respondents also revealed that the drying out of the lake has intensified long-distance migration of people and livestock to cities and towns of the basin’s countries.

The result has been competition for resources, especially farmer-pastoralist conflict. Between 2016 and 2019, almost 4,000 people died in Nigeria as a result of farmer-pastoralist conflicts.

As the lake has shrunk, the water has shifted towards Chad and Cameroon while the Nigerian and Nigerien sides have dried up. This forces people to cross national borders to reach the shoreline. Respect for boundaries disappears.

A complex web of social, economic, environmental, and political issues spills into interstate conflicts. This conflict relationship caused by access to and management of the lake has seriously affected the collective effort of the region’s states to fight Boko Haram.

Way ahead

The Lake Chad Basin Commission has identified the need to replenish the water body. There was a plan to build a dam and canals to pump water from the Congo River to the Chari River, Central African Republic and then on to Lake Chad.

It was first mooted in 1982 by the Italian engineering company Bonifica Spa, and discussed at the International Conference on Lake Chad in Abuja in 2018. Major challenges to this plan include funding, resistance from environmental campaigners and peaceful conditions in which to carry it out.

Unfortunately, this scheme is yet to see the light of the day. The commission’s member states lack the commitment required to take action, probably due to the conflict relationship between the other Lake Chad countries and Nigeria.

Yet if they want stability in the region, the key is to replenish the lake.

Saheed Babajide Owonikoko, Researcher, Centre for Peace and Security Studies, Modibbo Adama University of Technology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The military crackdown on Boko Haram has destroyed the economy around Lake Chad. Credit:Kristin Palitza/IPS

By Lyndal Rowlands
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 24 2017 (IPS)

Years of violence and unrest in North-East Nigeria have left millions of people at risk of starving to death. Both the violent up surging of Boko Haram and the government’s harsh military crackdown have left already historically marginalised communities with next to nothing.

Some towns have already seen all of their children aged less than five years of age die from starvation, according to Toby Lanzer, the UN’s coordinator for the region.

The violence, which began in North-East Nigeria has spilled over into the three other countries bordering Lake Chad: Cameroon, Niger and Chad.

A donor’s conference in Oslo, Norway on Friday raised $672 million dollars for the crisis – well short of the target of $1.5 billion.

IPS spoke to Sultana Begum, Oxfam Advocacy and Policy lead for the Lake Chad Basin crisis, who was in New York ahead of the donor’s conference.

The emphasis on responding militarily to the crisis has left already historically marginalised communities worse off, Begum told IPS.

“It isn’t just Boko Haram. It is the governments and the militaries of the region and the way that they are fighting this war,” she said. “In order to cut off Boko Haram from food and supplies, they have also cut off the lifeline of the civilian population.”

International governments have also been providing military and counter terrorism support in the region, says Begum, but she hopes they will also help support Nigeria to increase the humanitarian response through providing the funding needed to help people affected by the conflict.

The military has also been funding vigilantes as a way to fight Boko Haram, a strategy which could potentially backfire and do further harm to local communities, according to a new report released Wednesday by the International Crisis Group.

Meanwhile, the Nigerian military has also been leading parts of the humanitarian response, such as running refugee camps, says Begum.

“New areas that the military has retaken, it is very militarized,” she says. “As soon as possible the military needs to hand (the camps) over to the civilian authorities, to humanitarians.”

However the vast majority of displaced people sheltered in the region are living in the homes of relatives, distant acquaintances and even strangers, who have opened their homes.

“These communities have been so incredibly generous some of them have taken 5, 6 families into their own homes,” said Begum.

“They’ve shared the little food that they have and they have very little themselves. They’ve really opened their hearts. Really they’re the heroes of the story, and they haven’t just been helping for 6 months, 5 months, many of them have been hosting these families in their homes for 2 to 3, sometimes 4 years. Some of the host communities hope that people will pay rent but people really can’t afford to pay rent.”

“There are some taking major, major risks to continue fishing.” — Sultana Begum – Oxfam. Credit: Mustapha Muhammad/IPS.

Begum says that these communities are hosting some eighty percent of the people who are displaced in the region even though they themselves have their own struggles.

“If you look at Maiduguri, for example its an urban area, its an area that is historically been neglected. There are already issues to do with do people not having enough services like access to water, education.”

These host communities ”are really struggling themselves now,” says Begum. “They don’t have that much. There’s an economic crisis in Nigeria on top of everything else that’s going on. You know the price of food is really high. They have very little themselves and they need assistance.”

Sultana also notes that it’s important to recognise that people living on the edge economically may begin to see these groups as an option.

“When research has been done in terms of peoples’ motivations for joining Boko Haram, especially youth and young men in particular, the motivations are often to do with economics,” she said.

“Boko Haram offers them money. They offer them motorbikes. They offer them incentives. They offer them wives. You know these are all things that young men, they want. They need jobs, they need livelihoods and they want to get married and they want to have families and things like that. And those are opportunities they weren’t being offered.”

“So we’re hearing less about the ideological reasons why people are joining Boko Haram and more issues around the financial incentives.”

However in some cases the military crackdown has taken away what little economic opportunities these communities have.

Over the border in Niger, Begum says that emergency measures have destroyed the economy in the Diffa region.

“The two major economies are smoked fish and small pepper production.”

The small pepper “was so lucrative for the region,” people called it ‘red gold’.

“The emergency measures that were bought in banned fishing, banned the selling of fish, basically restricted peoples access to fuel and fertilizer, banned motorbikes, brought in curfews. So what that meant was that people stopped fishing. Most of these fishermen relied on fishing for 89 percent of their income,” she says.

“There are some taking major, major risks to continue fishing.”

“Some people have been killed by Boko Haram (or) they have been picked up by the military and accused of being Boko Haram, put into detention, or have disappeared.”

“The farmers are taking part in illegal trade. They are out trying to get hold of fuel and fertilizer illegally.”

This week the UN warned that North-East Nigeria alongside Yemen and Somalia, are at imminent risk of famine, after South Sudan on Monday became the first country to declare famine since 2012. In North-East Nigeria alone more than 5 million people now face serious food shortages, according to the UN.

In all of these four countries the current food crisis is considered man-made, the result of years of unresolved conflict.

However, despite their roots in conflict, much more than a military response is needed to end these crises.

Update: This article has been updated to include information about the funds raised in Oslo. An earlier headline has also been corrected.

Toby Lanzer, UN Assistant Secretary-General and Regional Humanitarian Coordinator for the Sahel speaks at the International Peace Institute. Credit: L Rowlands / IPS.

By Lyndal Rowlands
Jan 30 2017 (IPS)

Children under five years of age are not surviving due to severe food shortages in some parts of the Lake Chad region, says Toby Lanzer, UN Assistant Secretary-General and Regional Humanitarian Coordinator for the Sahel.

“I saw adults sapped of energy who couldn’t stand up, I saw an entire town devoid of two-year olds, three-year olds, four-year olds, and when we asked where are the children – and I get upset when I say this – we were told that they had died, they had starved.”

This was the situation Lanzer saw on a visit to the town of Bama in Northern Nigeria in 2016. He described the visit at a discussion with policy makers, diplomats and journalists at the International Peace Institute – a New York think tank – on Wednesday 25 January.

The crisis has left millions of people living on the edge in the Lake Chad basin, due to a combination of abject poverty, climate change and violent extremism, said Lanzer. Four countries – Chad, Cameroon, Niger, and Nigeria – border Lake Chad, which has shrunk dramatically since the 1960s.

“Around Lake Chad there are now well over 10 million people who I could categorise as desperately in need of … life-saving aid,” he said, including 7.1 million people categorised as “severely food insecure.”

In response to a question from IPS, Lanzer described how ongoing violence in the region has contributed to the food shortages:

“About 85 percent of people across this part of the world depend on the weather and agriculture livestock – it’s an agro-pastoralist community.”

“If your movement is confined you may not plant and communities across the Lake Chad basin have lost the last three planting seasons if you don’t plant than you don’t harvest and if you don’t harvest than you don’t have food,” he said.

“If your cattle or your goats or your livestock isn’t moving cows that don’t walk get sick and they die and then you’ve lost your livelihood,” he added.

Lanzer, whose humanitarian career has seen him work in Sudan, South Sudan, Timor-Leste, and the Central African Republic said that the poverty in the Lake Chad region is some of the worst he has witnessed.

“I don’t think I’ve been to villages before where people don’t have flip-flops, where people don’t have plastic,” he said.

However Lanzer noted that ongoing violence in the region – including due to extremist group Boko Haram – was one of the biggest factors disrupting the lives of people in the region.

Els Debuf, Senior Adviser and Head of Humanitarian Affairs at the International Peace Institute said that although the crisis in the Lake Chad region is one of the most severe it is also one of the most under-reported.

She noted that despite the region’s extreme poverty, communities were also sheltering refugees and internally displaced persons:

“Close to two and half million refugees and internally displaced people – the vast majority of whom are children – are sheltered throughout the region by communities who are themselves among the poorest and most vulnerable in the world,” she said.

The governments of Norway, Nigeria and Germany are planning a pledging conference to raise funds for the crisis in Nigeria and the Lake Chad region on 24 February in Oslo, Norway.

A famous saying goes: To whom much is given, much is expected. This is the message that the African Development Bank (AfDB) is carrying and delivering for, and on behalf of Africa at the global conference on climate change, COP21, which opened Monday, 30th November.

“All fingers are not equal. Those who pollute more should do more in saving our planet,” said AfDB President, Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, who is leading his bank’s team at the climate change conference in Paris.

Adesina, a former Minister of Agriculture in Nigeria, knows what climate change has done and what its implications are for Africa’s agricultural development if nothing is done to halt global warming.

“The danger that Africa will not be able to feed itself is a real one. And if we don’t have resources to adapt to climate change, Africa will not be able to unlock potential in agriculture,” said Adesina, highlighting the implications of climate change variability on Africa’s agricultural transformation agenda.

He says the bank’s message at the COP 21 was clear: a new climate deal that does not work for Africa is no deal at all.

According to Dr. Adesina, the major and historic polluters must take a fair share of responsibility not only to cut their emissions but also help the suffering adapt to climate impacts.

The AfDB’s stance resonates with a long standing position of the African Group of Negotiators (AGN)which has been pushing for a common but differentiated principle demanding historic emitters to cut emissions to keep warming below 1.5 degrees celsius and provide funding for adaptation for vulnerable countries, most of which are in Africa.

With impacts ranging from droughts and floods affecting agricultural production and water availability in the southern and Sahel regions of Africa, to shrinking rivers, a classic example being Lake Chad, African countries are hoping for a climate deal that would address these challenges both in the short and long term.

“Adaptation as you know is key for Africa but this time we are demanding a high level of adaptation equal to mitigation because we know that the two are closely linked,” Chair of the African Group of Negotiators Nagmeldin Elhassan told a high level panel discussion at the on-going climate talks in Paris.

Nagmeldin said African heads of state are expecting nothing short of a fair and just deal for the continent, a victim of circumstances it never caused.

He said adaptation would be a key issue at the COP 21 negotiating table for Africa as over the years, the African Group of Negotiators has been seeking for parity between mitigation, adaptation and provisions for enhancing means of implementation, noting the increased burden for adaptation in developing countries.

“When we speak adaptation, we link it to means of implementation as a way of getting developed countries involved to provide support,” the AGN chair said.

And the African Union Commissioner for Rural Economy and Agriculture, Rhoda Peace Tumutsime puts it categorically that, “Unless we get a good deal here, that will help with the right technology, we will not be able to modernize and transform agriculture.”

The question of means of implementation is a critical component of this year’s COP. According the African Climate Policy Centre (ACPC) of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa-(UNECA), climate change could stimulate developing economies into adapting sustainable development paths, through entrepreneurial opportunities, and spaces for policy makers to address equity concerns in gender and youth policies.

Dr. Carlos Lopez of UNECA argues Africa’s possible positive outcome from danger. “Despite all the negative news that is reported about Africa, there are opportunities that we can take advantage of. It is very important to get the perceptions right about Africa’s challenges and available opportunities. In all the bad news are potential areas for growth,” he said.

Dr Lopez said Africa has a massive advantage to develop differently by embracing the opportunities that climate change offers to develop sustainably.

“It is also important for us to realize that we are not going to make it using the same carbon intensive model…let’s take for example, under the 2063 agenda we have to create 122 million jobs. Following the carbon path, we will only create 54 million jobs, but what about the deficit?” he asked.

Citing various examples of opportunities among which is renewable energy owing to Africa’s natural potential of solar, the UNECA Chief is more than convinced that the continent should be part of the solution and “achieve industrialization which is cleaner, greener, without following the carbon model.”

However, the question of resources still remains. Will the climate deal offer Africa this opportunity? The next week or so will decide what and which way forward.

(End)

Fishing families on Lake Malawi, Karonga District. Many fisherfolk have said they have been beaten up and detained by Tanzanian police since the dispute over the lake began late last year. Credit: Mabvuto Banda/IPS

By Mabvuto Banda
KARONGA, Malawi, Feb 27 2013 (IPS)

Since he was nine years old, Martin Mhango from Karonga village in northern Malawi has known no other livelihood than fishing. And for the last 33 years he has been fishing freely on Lake Malawi – that is, until last October when he was detained and beaten by Tanzanian security forces.



“They stopped me, dragged me to the beach where they beat me up and detained me. They told me that I had trespassed and was fishing on the Tanzanian side,” Mhango, 42, told IPS. “I was told to never fish on their side again.  He had been fishing on both sides of the lake for years, he said, just as Tanzanian fisherfolk did.

The dispute over Africa’s third-largest lake, which is also known as Lake Nyasa in Tanzania, dates back half a century.

Malawi claims sovereignty over the entirety of the 29,600-square-kilometre lake that straddles the borders of Malawi, Mozambique and Tanzania.

Meanwhile, Tanzania says 50 percent is part of its territory.

The dispute between both southern African countries reignited when Malawi awarded exploration licenses to United Kingdom-based Surestream Petroleum in 2011 to search for oil and gas on Lake Malawi.

Tanzanian authorities want Surestream Petroleum to postpone any planned drilling on the lake until the dispute is resolved. But Malawi has remained defiant.

Last December, the Malawian government awarded the second-largest oil exploration license (after the Surestream license) to South African company SacOil Holdings Limited.

So far, oil companies have yet to begin drilling and are still exploring the centre of the lake, which has been cordoned off.

But several fishing families like Mhango’s that work along Songwe River in northern Malawi are already caught up in this row, making the fisherman fear that the two countries will eventually go to war.

After the October incident, Mhango has been careful not to venture into the waters on the purportedly Tanzanian side, which has affected his livelihood.

A reduced catch has lowered his income from over 286 dollars per month to just 142 dollars.

“I have all my life been a fisherman and this is the first time I am unable to fish freely on the lake and I fear for my future,” he said.

Josiah Mwangoshi, 52, remembers belonging to two villages when he was growing up – one on the Malawian side and another on the Tanzanian side.

“My village is right along Songwe River and I remember that when the river used to shift its course, we would migrate to the Tanzanian side and later on return to the Malawian side when the river shifted again,” Mwangoshi told IPS.

“But I am now afraid that the Tanzanians may arrest me. I can no longer live and fish on the Tanzanian side where I also have a family, because it’s now clear that the dispute is very deep,” he said.

Reports of alleged beatings and harassment of Malawian fisherfolk in October last year forced Malawi’s President Joyce Banda to cut off the dialogue that had started between the two countries.

The wrangle deepened when last November Tanzania published a new map shifting the boundary between Tanzania and Malawi to the middle of the lake.

Banda, angry with the new map and Tanzania’s harassment of fisherfolk, called a press conference in the capital Lilongwe a few days later and announced that she had protested to the United Nations General Secretary and cancelled a planned state visit to Tanzania.

But Tanzanian High Commissioner to Malawi, Patrick Tsere, defended his country’s actions saying that no Malawian fisherfolk have ever been harassed in Tanzanian territorial waters.

“Tanzania’s security forces have never engaged in such behaviour. It’s rather us who have been worried that Malawian planes have been seen flying into Tanzania territory without our permission,” Tsere told IPS.

Many believe that the row over the lake has the potential to worsen if significant oil and gas is discovered.

“This dispute has been around for over 50 years but it has heightened and entered the public domain now because of the potential of oil and gas discoveries,” Udule Mwakasungura, the executive director for the Centre for Human Rights and Rehabilitation, a Malawian NGO, told IPS.

“Lake Malawi contains more than 2,000 different fish species — our worry is that oil exploration and its subsequent drilling will affect the fresh water ecosystem,” he added.

The lake has been witnessing a decline in fish stocks from 30,000 metric tonnes a year to just 2,000 tonnes over the last 20 years, according to a recent Ministry of Agriculture report read in parliament this February.

Last month, both countries presented their position papers after agreeing that the dispute would be mediate by the Southern African Development Community former heads of state, also known as the African Forum.

“We agreed with Tanzania that we will hand over the mediation to the African Forum and so far we have both presented our position papers. A mediation process should commence before the end of this month or early March,” Malawi’s Secretary for Foreign Affairs and International Co-operation, Patrick Kabambe, told IPS.

Mhango and Mwangoshi have pinned all their hopes on the mediation efforts.

“I have been following news reports about this on the radio and my prayer is that the former African leaders resolve this issue once and for all,” said Mwangoshi.

Mhango has similar hopes. “All I want is to go back and start fishing freely on this lake — because without that, my family’s future is doomed.”

Bordered by Chad, Cameroon, Niger and Nigeria, Lake Chad once spanned 25,000 square kilometres but in the last half century it has shrunk by 90 percent. Credit: Mustapha Muhammad/IPS

By Ngala Killian Chimtom
GULFE, Cameroon, Feb 9 2013 (IPS)

Approaching the Lake Chad basin from Gulfe, a small locality 45 kilometres from Cameroon’s Far North Regional capital Maroua, the atmosphere of despair is palpable: dusty air, fierce and unrelenting winds, wilting plants and sand dunes suggest that this once lush area is undergoing a terrible change.

Nothing breaks the expanse of sparse vegetation but the occasional withered tree and some scorched shrubs.

Bordered by Chad, Cameroon, Niger and Nigeria, Lake Chad once spanned 25,000 square kilometres but in the last half century it has shrunk by 90 percent, its total surface area now covering a mere 2,500 square kilometres.

As a result of feeble rainfall, the Chari and the Logone – the two main rivers that feed the lake – are bringing less and less water each year.

Herders, fisherfolk and farmers who have relied for generations on the rich soil of this basin are now struggling to survive, as the great lake dries up before their very eyes.

On the banks of the lake, Mahamat Aboubakar is disentangling a tiny black catfish from a large net.

“Before, you needed to cast the net just a few times to get thousands of fish,” Aboubakar tells IPS. “But today, it may require a whole day’s work to get this,” he says, pointing to the miserable catch, which is worth about two dollars and is likely to be his only income for the day.

Back when the lake was healthy and teeming with life, the 64-year old fisherman could earn as much as 50 dollars. Now, he can only expect his catch to get smaller – and himself poorer – as the lake’s waters continue to recede.

“This is a disaster,” Sanusi Imran Abdullahi, executive director of the Lake Chad Basin Commission (LCBC) – a regional body created by the countries bordering the lake with the aim of regulating water use and other natural resources in the basin – tells IPS.

NASA satellite imagery shows desert land around a shrinking Lake Chad. Credit: Goddard Space Flight Center/CC-BY-2.0

“It is already taking its toll on residents around the lake,” he adds. In order to prevent a potentially catastrophic situation, “we are working to save Lake Chad and the 30 million people whose livelihoods depend on the natural resources” of this water body.

It is impossible to blame the crisis on one single factor, experts say.

Environmentalist Paul Ghogomou of the University of Yaounde in Cameroon tells IPS, “Desertification, climate change as well as the continuous diversion of water from the rivers that feed the lake are responsible.”

He explains that water from Cameroon’s Chari River – which, fed by its tributary, the Logone, provides over 90 percent of Lake Chad’s water – is being diverted to irrigation projects in the surrounding area.

Meanwhile, dams built along the Jama’are and Hadejia Rivers in northeastern Nigeria are “partly responsible for the shrinkage”, he says.

LCBC’s Abdullahi adds that population pressure is also stretching the lake to breaking point.

“Forty years ago, the population within the Lake Chad area was about 17 million. Now, we number about 30 million. So rising demand by the population, the rising numbers of livestock as well as massive evaporation as a result of climate change have all combined to shrink the lake,” he notes.

For the time being, farmers and fisher folk are showing resilience, adapting as best they can to a looming crisis.

Ahmadou Bello, a fisherman in Gulfe, has simply turned to farming, producing such crops as cowpea, maize, rice and peppers without using fertilisers.

Showing off this thriving farm with a wave of his hand, he tells IPS the disappearing lake has “left behind very fertile land”.

But if the lake does not return, even the remaining humidity left by its receding waters will evapourate, and farmers will be left with few options for a livelihood.

Can the waters be replenished?

In an effort to implement more sustainable solutions, member countries of the LCBC – Chad, Cameroon, Niger, Nigeria and the Central African Republic (CAR) – have developed an ambitious plan to replenish the lake with water from the Obangui, a tributary of the Congo River.

Abdullahi says the project will involve the “construction of a retention dam at Palambo (upstream of the CAR’s capital Bangui) to serve as a catchment area. The high flow through pumping will then enter River Fafa – a tributary of Ouham – and by gravity through a 1,350-kilometre-long feeder channel (flow) in to the River Chari in Cameroon and then to Lake Chad.

“There is so much water in the Congo that goes into the ocean. We are just going to take a fraction of it to save the lives of 30 million people who depend on the lake for their survival,” he says.

He further explained that the project would also extend the electricity supply, ensure river transportation in order to move goods from east to west across Africa and develop irrigation and agro-industry in the region.

“So the programme isn’t only (designed) to bring water to Lake Chad, but also to improve economic activity and the livelihoods of people within the Congo Basin,” he tells IPS.

But a dearth of financial resources is likely to delay the project’s implementation – according to Abdullahi the scheme will cost a staggering 14.5 billion dollars

While heads of state in the region have shown some political commitment, the LCBC is primarily looking to the global community for help.

“We will host an international donors’ conference early this year to see what we can get, and from there we will (assess) what the member states will contribute,” he explains.

The bulk of the financing is likely to come from the private sector, as long as funders are guaranteed a return on their investment. “I am sure they will be interested,” says an optimistic Abdullahi.

The cost of the project may look frightening, but the cost of inaction could be even more devastating, experts say.

According to the Canadian firm CIMA-International, which carried out feasibility studies on the water transfer project, Lake Chad could disappear altogether by 2025 if nothing is done to save it.