Water and Political Conflicts in Africa

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 ...