Lake Victoria meeting fails to address key resource concerns

Despite talks to jointly harness shared resources for regional economic development, Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania are yet to resolve key issues surrounding the management of Lake Victoria.

Water excavation, overfishing and the Migingo question continue to pose a challenge even as the region celebrates 10 years of co-operation.

The resources impact on the health of the lake, foreign exchange, security and territorial integrity of each country.

And at a recent stakeholders meeting in Kisumu, each government allegedly instructed its delegates to limit debate on these issues due to parallel attempts to resolve the matter.

The Lake Victoria Basin Commission (LVBC) believes the unilateral actions by partner states are depleting the water resource.

The commission told The EastAfrican that remedies to these concerns are in the pipeline.

They include formulation of a policy for extraction of water from the lake, legislation to regulate transportation and fishing in the lake and a joint survey to resolve the Migingo territorial feud between Uganda and Kenya.

The meeting was meant to detail new projects on the lake: The second phase of an environmental project aimed at sustainable rehabilitation of the lake’s ecosystem; a project aimed at achieving the Millennium Development Goals on water and sanitation; a communication facility to reduce accidents on the lake; a Mt. Elgon conservation project; an HIV reduction project; and a Mara River basin conservation initiative.

Ill-prepared

But the delegates only gave a brief description of the projects, saying the region was ill-prepared to put up a strong case at next month’s climate change meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark, and the Nile Basin negotiations where Egypt and Sudan have become their stalemate factor.

The meeting however discussed at length the fears of implementing the new regional laws on transportation on the lake, and the HIV problem among communities living within the basin.

Uganda has often been accused of releasing excess water into River Nile in order to turn turbines for electricity generation.

A hydrologist and LVBC’s focal point officer in Uganda, Joel Okonga, said: “Professional analysis shows that 90 per cent of the drop in water levels of the lake was caused by climate change, while extra-release at Jinja accounted for only 10 per cent.”

Kenya is accused of depleting the lake through overfishing, with fishing vessels reportedly having increased six-fold in 2000 from 10,000 in the 1980s and the catch per vessel rising.

Tanzania, too, has an ambitious two million-hectare irrigation programme that uses water from the lake.