Water and Political Conflicts in Africa

Hi! This is just a brief post to recommend the  2020 TED Talk of Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim on the benefits of indigenous knowledge for addressing issues of climate change in the Lake Chad region.  Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim by Afrique Connection in 2018 The environmental activist, part of the Mbororo community in Chad, talks about the dramatic effects of climate change on the Lake Chad Basin’s resources and on her traditional nomadic herder practices. She expresses the consequences that it had on the people’s social life, especially, the migration of men to other parts of the basin or even to Europe, in order to feed and sustain their families, and ‘those left behind’, namely the women, who have to take up the role of men for security, food and water. Most importantly, she advocates in favour of using indigenous knowledge in order to find coping mechanisms and survive in the water-stressed environment of the Lake Chad. Integrating traditional knowledge with Western-centred technolog...

Hi guys! This week’s post will examine the hydropolitics of the Lake Chad and the premise of peace from a regional security cooperation.  The Lake Chad Basin and its large wetlands, aquifers and groundwater is essential to the four riparian sates, as well as Algeria, Central African Republic, Libya and Sudan. Consequently, peacefully sharing such resources in the current complex unstable context of the lake is a challenge to regional security ( Asah, 2015 / Ani, Jungudo, Ojakorotu, 2018 ). Hydropolitics have thus been the focus of development programmes, claiming the need for a regional approach on security in the Lake Chad Basin ( Ani, Jungudo, Ojakorotu, 2018 ). Intrastate cooperation has been fostered by the 2015 redefinition of the Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF) as a collective security scheme driven by the state-members of the Lake Chad Basin Commission (LCBC) under the recognition of Boko Haram as a regional crisis ( Albert, 2017 ). The MNJTF military operations have ...

Hi guys! This post will examine farming practices in the complex context of the Lake Chad Basin, the changes that have been undertaken in order to cope with the latter and the conflicts as a consequence of political deficiencies.    The Lake Chad Basin’s resources have been central to farmers and herders in the region. Traditionally, food production for the population has been sustained by nomadic herders and pastoralists, which migrated in the region according to the seasonal variations of droughts and floodplains ( Zeiba, Yengoh, Tom, 2017 ). The shrinking of the basin along with the population growth have put a tremendous pressure on the goals of food security, the ambitions of economic and political stability and the livelihoods of farmers and herders. Herder in the Lake Chad from the International Committee of the Red Cross in 2020 Two outstanding changing practices have emerged in the current context of increased food and water demand. First, the farming challenges of hi...

Hi guys! I hope you had a nice reading week. This post will review the causal relationship between forced migration, water scarcity and ethnic violence in the Lake Chad Basin, particularly enhanced by Boko Haram insurgency.  First, since 2013, the violent attacks of Boko Haram have resulted in forced migration and displacement of people in the region which in turn, have largely contributed to the deepening of an ethnic crisis around the Lake Chad Basin ( Kanu, Bazza, Omojola, 2019 ). The Boko Haram-displaced people come essentially from the Borno State and the larger North-Eastern region in Nigeria, which accounts for 1.4 million forced migrants ( Médecin Sans Frontières, 2015 ).  Map of Internally Displaced People in the Lake Chad Basin from Médecin Sans Frontières in 2015 The wide influx of newly arrived people, most often in Chad, where the basin still offers a decent amount of freshwater, have led to the creation of new settlements and temporary migrant’s camps around the ...

Hi guys!  I hope you are well and safe during these difficult times. I will examine today water in the jihadist campaign of Boko Haram in the Lake Chad region.  This post does not contain any illustrative photos on purpose, as I wish to avoid the perpetration of stereotypical narratives of the conflicts with Boko Haram, as raised by Wainaina (2019) . I haven’t found any appropriate pictures in the articles and academics papers that I have read, and I didn’t want to borrow a meaningless photograph that would solely fulfil the aesthetics of my post.  The violent activities of Boko Haram in the Lake Chad Basin embody the key role that water plays in the current social, economic and political instability of the region. Boko Haram’s insurgency has begun in Nigeria in 2009 due to the ongoing poverty and corruption ( The Guardian, 2020 ). The country already displayed signs of water scarcity which were due to its infrastructural and economic mismanagement rather than a...

Hi! To pursue last week's argument on the feasibility of a water management cooperation, this post will look at the Transaqua project as an Intra-Basin Water Transfer (IBWT) initiative to ‘save the Lake Chad’.   The Transaqua project was first introduced in the late 1970s as a strategy of revitalisation of the Lake Chad by Bonifica, an Italian engineering firm ( Sayan, Nagabhatla, Ekwuribe, 2020 ). It has been resumed in the 2000s as the Lake Chad Basin Commission (LCBC) placed the IBWT initiative at the top of its political agenda. The project proposes the recharge of the lake water supply by building a 2,400km-long navigable canal from the Congo Basin ( Akanni, 2018 ). It plans on diverting about 30 billion cubical meters of water per year and 25,000 million kWh of hydroelectricity by the construction of numerous dams along the waterway ( Adeniran, Daniell, 2020 ). The project also includes a new Lagos-Mombasa Highway which aims at improving the region’s position in global trade ...