Lake Chad: Coping with The Crisis At Local Level
Since the 1990s, many international organisations reported that Lake Chad was shrinking at an alarming rate. Together with NASA’s satellite images, scientific studies concluded that the lake has shrunk by 90% since the mid-1960s due to increasing temperatures and over-extraction of water resources. Several news outlets portrayed the lake as “destined to dry”, relating the phenomenon to the effects of global warming. The perceived environmental crisis prompted many international organisations to intervene in the region.
Lake Chad is situated in the Sahel Region of Africa and bordered by four countries: Chad, Nigeria, Niger and Cameroon. The lake is virtually a miracle in the heart of the Sahel that serves food and water to more than 10 million people. The region, however, suffers from mass poverty and hunger, coupled with a growing population and a significant lack of resources. Moreover, Boko Haram, an insurgency originating in northern Nigeria, is terrorising the region, occupying the lake and its resources and displacing millions of people from their homes. Although these issues are not environmental per se, the crisis in Lake Chad was mainly perceived as such until very recently.
In recent years, scientific studies have found that the lake is not shrinking; it is fluctuating. Geographers have discovered that the lake’s hydrology causes water levels to change throughout the year, between years, and over longer periods. There is also striking evidence suggesting that the lake completely dried up at certain points in time, such as at the beginning of the 16th century. More recently, in the midst of the Sahel drought, the northern part of the lake completely dried up and remained in that state for more than a year, later regaining its water levels.
As a consequence of discovering significant spatial variations, the World Bank, in 2015, has reported that the long-term future of Lake Chad is unclear. Moreover, in 2019, Adelphi found that the lake’s size has been slowly increasing since the 1990s. So, the general opinion that the lake is “destined to dry” due to climate change would be misleading.
The assumption that people are suffering because of the small size of the lake would also be misleading. Recent studies indeed found that low water levels in Lake Chad do not undermine people’s ability to secure their livelihoods. This is because fluctuations in water levels open and close certain livelihood opportunities, and locals shift between these. The International Crisis Group in 2017 reported that the Sahel drought opened up large areas of fertile land suitable for agriculture and livestock herding. As a result, locals shifted to these activities while leaving fisheries.
If lake fluctuations are natural and not detrimental to people’s ability to survive, then there must be another way of explaining widespread poverty, declining resources and mass violence that we still see in the region today. Rather than being environmental, as it was long thought to be the case, these issues stem from factors relating to underdevelopment and weak governance. Solving these would require strong political will from the countries bordering Lake Chad and a local-level approach taken by their respective governments.
There have been several humanitarian programmes addressing the crisis in Lake Chad. However, the relative ineffectiveness of these programmes was caused by their lack of understanding of how the lake is governed locally.
The two most extensive programmes that concern Lake Chad is PRODEBALT (2008–2017) and PRESIBALT (2015–2021). The former (PRODEBALT) focused on distributing goods, services and infrastructure to Lake Chad Basin, such as fishery landing piers, fishing monitoring stations and modern fish markets. The latter (PRESIBALT), whilst undertaking similar activities, introduced community-based thinking. This meant doing most of the work at local level while collaborating with diverse social groups to understand their needs.
Especially the latter programme, with its approach to the issue, is promising because it aims to take a local-level approach to better understand the root causes of the issue. Yet, several programme documents suggest high levels of ambiguity regarding whom the goods, services and infrastructure were distributed to and whom these were distributed through. Moreover, there is little information regarding the implementation of the programmes. Upon correspondence with the Regional Coordinator of PRESIBALT, certain site visits were implied, yet it was stated that the reports on these visits would not be available to the public.
From the most extensive programmes addressing the crisis in Lake Chad, it is impossible to understand what is going on at the centre of the crisis. As suggested before, this crisis is not solely an environmental one. Instead, it is one of underdevelopment and weak governance. To uncover these factors, it is crucial to understand how the lake is governed at local level and who the potential stakeholders are.
Households making their living on the shores of the lake are far removed spatially, politically and legally from policymakers. As a result, traditional tribes dominate the area. The Kanuri aristocracy, forming a semi-independent informal governance system, has retained significant autonomy in allocating land around lakeshores while being subject to minimal oversight from formal state institutions.
A case in point would be the series of events that followed after a method of fishing was introduced. Following the shrinkage of the lake between the 1960s and 1990s, the dumba method of fishing (fish fences) became widespread amongst locals. However, the Nigerian Inland Fisheries Decree of 1992 prohibited dumba, showing evidence that the fish stock might get depleted. By banning the use of the method, Nigeria also banned the licensing and taxation of it. Nonetheless, this method of fishing continued, and some local governments did not stop the licensing and taxation of dumba. As a result, several site visits were conducted by federal officials, and local governments stopped malpractices. The Kanuri class took over from where the local governments left off and continued allocating dumba sites and collecting taxes while expanding their reach over different areas.
The above situation points at the core of the issue; any policy going through the modern state will be relatively ineffective. This is because, in reality, formal state institutions are so remote from the lake that informal authorities are now governing the area. Failing to recognise the importance of such authorities is a hindrance to solving the crisis.
Therefore, recognising traditional authorities as potential stakeholders is the first step toward solving the crisis. Although the informal system created by these powers has intrinsic issues of being arbitrary and illegitimate, independent field research notes that the conventional system around the lake functions well; citizens generally understand land access rules. Therefore, no matter how arbitrary and illegitimate it may be, the established system creates somewhat an opportunity to improve the whole governance process. Given that the traditional and modern authorities around the lake already collaborate regarding how the lake is being used, institutionalising and systematising this collaboration would be a start.
The crisis in Lake Chad has shown that local problems require local solutions. Internationally driven programmes with broad and ambiguous goals were ineffective in tackling what is essentially a local problem but with regional consequences. To address the crisis in Lake Chad, government officials would need to develop a proper set of local-level programmes. Whilst implementing these, governments should prioritise two matters: collaboration with relevant stakeholders and transparency in documenting progress. The former is fundamental to ensure proper enforcement of programmes. The latter would allow future programmes to learn from their predecessors and develop them further.
Although the crisis in Lake Chad has been seen as one of the worst and most complicated, there is still a window of opportunity to be recognised by those concerned. How this situation will unfold in the future will depend on whether respective governments and international organisations realise that their headed direction is not of much merit.
