The seasonal Ngadda River in Maiduguri.
A dam shame…
How big water projects helped trigger Africa’s migrant crisis, leaving an
arid landscape in their wake as they become environmental refugees.
By Fred Pearce
M
ajor dam and irrigation projects
are drying up the wetlands that
sustain life in the arid Sahel
region of Africa. The result has been
a wave of environmental refugees,
as thousands of people flee, many on
boats, to Europe.
The Hadejia-Nguru wetland was
once a large green smudge on the
edge of the Sahara in northeast
Nigeria. More than 1.5 million people
lived by fishing its waters, grazing
their cattle on its wet pastures, and
irrigating their crops from its complex
network of natural channels and
lakes. Then, in the 1990s, the Nigerian
government completed two dams that
together captured 80% of the water
that flowed into the wetland.
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The aim was to provide water for
Kano, the biggest city in northern
Nigeria. But the two dams dried up
four-fifths of the wetland, destroying
its natural bounty and the way of life
that went with it. Today, many of the
people who lost their livelihoods have
either headed for Kano, joined the
Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram
that is terrorising northeast Nigeria
– or paid human-smugglers to take
them to Europe.
Water mismanagement
For the past three years, Europe has
been convulsed by a crisis of migrants,
some from Syria and the war-torn
Middle East, but also hundreds of
thousands coming from the arid Sahel
Water Sewage & Effluent November/December 2017
region of Africa, including Nigeria, Mali,
and Senegal. They are fleeing poverty
and social breakdown caused by
insurgent groups such as Boko Haram.
But environmentalists and others in the
region say that behind this social chaos
lies serious water mismanagement in the
drought-prone region.
Big dams intended to bring economic
development to the Sahel are having
the opposite effect. By blocking
rivers, they are drying out lakes, river
floodplains, and wetlands on which
many of the poorest in the region
depend. The end result has been to
push more and more young people to
risk their lives to leave the region.
The Manantali Dam is estimated
to have caused the loss of 90% of