ABUJA, NIGERIA – When Engr. I.K. Musa looks out through the windows of his office in the nation’s capital he sees a hilly landscape green from abundant rainfall.
Livestock grows fat. Water flows from the tap. Workers feel secure, stable and content.
He knows that’s a far cry from life along the hot, flat, arid and barren lower reaches of the Komadugu Yobe Basin (KYB). On its parched banks, 10 million poor Nigerian fishers, herders and farmers depend on the river for their daily survival.
Few appreciate the stark contrast, the growing tensions, and the high stakes more than Musa, Director of Irrigation and Drainage at the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Water Resources. The arid KYB’s has troubled him “more than any river in Nigeria.”
Its stressed waters mean that, handled wrongly, his legacy could easily become one of explosive conflict. But he adds that, for the same reason “if we can achieve a recovery, equity and balance through a Catchment Management Plan here, it would transform integrated water resource management throughout the entire country.”
For years such hopes met bleak realities. Musa knew the population in that river basin grew 2.5 percent each year, compounding demand. He knew that due to human use and natural climatic changes in the last few decades the river is diminishing, cutting supply.
Worse still, he knew the KYB was not exclusively his Ministry’s jurisdiction. Nigeria shared the KYB tributaries with a neighboring state, Niger, which along with Chad and Cameroon share the river’s desert terminus mouth, Lake Chad.
As the remnant of a ancient inland sea, Lake Chad has shrunk over time and retreated across borders from 25,000 square km to 2,000 square km, just 1.5 meters deep. Hungry subsistence farmers on the Nigerian side of the lake have been chasing the water as it recedes until they are living in Chad but still believe they are within Nigeria. With 20 million people in four countries depending on resources that may dry up completely by 2010, the vanishing waters are a recipe for border disputes, ecological disaster, even war.
“In 1964 UNEP/GEF set up the Lake Chad Basin Commission to avert conflict,” said Musa, “but its mandate was too broad to be effective.” And there were local interventions like DFID’s Joint Wetlands Livelihood project, “but its limited scope was too narrow.” When IUCN proposed a comprehensive integrated approach, the conditions were ripe for reform. Ironically, two turning points for progress involved conflict and a flood.
In the late 1980s, agricultural interests in Bauchi State put pressure on the government to build a third dam on the upper River Jama’are, called Kafin Zaki Dam. But after seeing the effects of two dams at Challawa Gorge and Tiga, the downstream opposition to the dam grew so fierce “that, even the military could not proceed, despite all power being under a dictatorship.” What held up the dam most was the respected voice of Dr. Bukar Shuaib, “the grandfather of water resources management in Nigeria. He is the one who really alarmed the authorities, and made them reexamine the project.” Tensions rose.
Then in 1998, sudden heavy rainfall drove panicked water managers in Kano to open the gates of Tiga and Challawa, releasing water filling fast behind the dams. The disastrous manmade floods led downstream states Yobe and Jigawa to demand improved plans.
With support from IUCN, Engr. Musa pushed the concept of a Catchment Management Plan, but he said that given “the need for certain details missing in the data” – where sources came from, and went, and how and why they were demanded, and by whom – “all parties joined to fill the gaps first through a proper Water Audit in the basin.”
“When through the audit it became clear that agriculture wasn’t an efficient user,” yet was soaking up the lion’s share of the water, “it put my department at loggerheads with the rest of the basin” said Musa. But he argued that to lock in trust, “I felt that we must be the first to make sacrifices; not fisheries or cities downstream. So our sacrifice took away a sense of bias, and now each other sector is making a contribution.”
Most water officials seek to leave behind a tangible legacy in the form of a concrete structure: a dam, barrage or irrigation canals. Musa questions such ‘hard’ infrastructures, given the threats from evaporation. What lasts, he says, is ‘soft infrastructure’ like a functional CMP for the basin, invisible but felt everywhere.
The CMP may be replicated nationwide, and scaled up for the region. Already the Lake Chad Basin Commission accepted KYB as its strategic action plan. “We will succeed if the institutions are in place,” he says confidently.
But Musa knows the price of successful collaboration is that he must share his legacy with other partners. “So be it,” he says. “Defeat is an orphan, victory has many fathers.”
Written by Jamie Workman