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Nowhere is Africa’s predicament more poignant than on the shores of
Lake Chad, a large water-filled depression in the middle of the Sahel. Here,
in the early 1960s, newly independent Nigeria laid plans for one of the
largest farming schemes in Africa. The South Chad Irrigation Project was
to tap the waters of the lake and turn the surrounding desert green. Today,
three decades and almost a billion pounds later, 4000 kilometres of canals
are permanently dry, victims of changing climate.

The first stages of the South Chad project were planned in 1962, the
last year before the Sahel plunged into an unremitting period of disastrously
low rainfall. That year, the lake reached its highest level this century.
Since then, flows in the Rivers Logone and Chari, which feed the lake, have
halved and the lake, which loses 2 metres of water through evaporation each
year, has shrunk. In 1962, it was larger than Wales. Now it is less than
a tenth the size. Villages that were flooded in 1962 are now almost 100
kilometres from the shoreline.

The project ‘has been a disaster’, says Terry Evans from the consulting
firm Mott MacDonald in Cambridge, who helped to design it. ‘The hydrology
was done in three weeks. I suggested at the time that we should look at
another source of water, but the idea was dismissed out of hand.’ The company
boasted that the 30-kilometre long intake channel for the project was ‘designed
to operate at all stages of lake water level’. Today, the intake sits as
useless as the many rotting ships that litter the landscape, at times more
than 60 kilo-metres from the lake shore, which has now retreated over the
border into Cameroon. Hopes that lake levels might return to normal following
heavy rains in 1988 have been dashed by two more years of below average
rainfall in the Sahel.

Is the change in the region’s rainfall permanent, perhaps connected
to the greenhouse effect, or a mere aberration? Nobody can tell. All Nigeria,
Africa’s most populous country, knows is that the flagship project for the
development of its arid northern provinces is beached.

But the country’s engineers, fearing a permanent change in the weather,
say they have the answer. They want to capture some of the waters of Africa’s
largest river, three countries away in Zaire. The flow of the River Zaire,
which drains the central African rainforest, is almost 40 000 cubic metres
per second, a figure beaten only by the River Amazon. Nigeria wants to pump
up to a tenth of this water across the Central African Republic and into
the headwaters of the River Chari, from where it could refill Lake Chad.
It would in the words of one Nigerian engineer behind the scheme, J. Umolu
of Nigeria’s National Electric Power Authority, provide a ‘permanent solution
to the problem of drought in west central Africa’.

The plan sounds like a piece of engineering megalomania, on a par with
the Soviet Union’s scheme to divert Siberian rivers to irrigate fields around
one of its own inland lakes, the Aral Sea. The scheme was about to begin
construction in the mid-1980s when Mikhail Gorbachov vetoed it. But Umolu
says his plan is perfectly feasible. The River Fafa, one of the tributaries
of the Chari, begins only 150 kilometres from the path of one of the main
rivers of the Zaire Basin, the River Ubangi. Linking these two rivers could
form the first stage of the project, with extra water transferred later
into the Ubangi from the River Zaire itself. Eventually, he says, pumps
could divert a third of the flow of the River Zaire at Bumba into the Chad
basin.

The idea of watering the Sahel with Zairian water is not entirely new.
Before independence swept Africa, colonial engineers recommended that the
Zaire River Basin, more than 10 per cent of the continent, might be flooded
to form a Congo Sea, which could spill over into the Sahara. Umolu says
that millions of years ago, the River Zaire discharged not into the South
Atlantic but into an ancient sea in the Chad region. This fact is hardly
likely to assuage the fears of ecologists about the havoc likely to follow
the introduction of rainforest plants, fish, insects and diseases into the
rivers of the Sahel.

The idea is a long way from implementation. Detailed feasibility studies
have not yet been done. But the proposal is backed by Nigerian agricultural
officials and the Lake Chad Basin Commission, which has representatives
from Chad, Niger, Cameroon and Nigeria, the four nations bordering the lake.
It also has the public support of the man who controls the waters, President
Mobutu of Zaire. He sees the prospect of foreign investment in hydroelectric
power schemes in return for giving his water away. And the project has caught
the imagination of foreign firms of consulting engineers. One firm, Bonifica
of Italy, has produced its own blueprint, known as Transaqua. The firm’s
proposal says that ‘we must not be afraid of thinking big’ and compares
its scheme to the Channel Tunnel and the Suez Canal.

The Transaqua project is, if anything, even more ambitious than the
Nigerian proposal. Rather than pumping water over the Central African hills
in pipes, it envisages a giant navigable canal running for 2400 kilometres
round the rim of the saucer-shaped Zaire Basin, starting near Burundi, barely
a stone’s throw from the headwaters of the River Nile in East Africa.

The canal would intercept numerous tributaries of the River Zaire before
heading across remote, sparsely populated bush and pouring into the Chari.
It could carry 100 cubic kilo-metres of water a year, says Bonifica, rather
more than the River Rhine through Germany; generate more than 30 billion
kilowatt hours of electricity each year, two-thirds of Italy’s energy output,
and irrigate up to 70 000 square kilometres of fields or pastures, more
than half the size of England.

The electricity could be sold widely in central Africa and would fuel
two vast industrial parks in the backwoods of the Central African Republic
and in Zaire, one at the point where the pan-African highway, currently
being bulldozed through the bush from Lagos to Mombasa, would cross the
waterway and the other on a proposed spur of the highway. Bonifica promises
that the Transaqua project would become ‘a decisive propulsive element for
the practical start-up . . . of the African post-colonial dream of the international
economic and productive integration of the continent.

Could such a project make any difference to the plight of the millions
caught up in the killing fields of the Sahel? Or would it, like many ‘megaprojects’
in Africa, turn into a billion dollar waste of foreign technical expertise
and aid money?

Shortage of water is a serious problem in Africa. It impedes economic
progress, causes disease and, in times of drought, imperils the survival
of whole communities. ‘Water scarcity now threatens two-thirds of the African
population,’ says Malin Falkenmark, professor of international hydrology
at Sweden’s Natural Science Research Council. She is one of a handful of
academics to specialise in global water resources. Her analysis shows that,
quite apart from seasonal droughts, by the year 2000, there will be permanent
water crises in Tunisia, Kenya, Malawi, Burundi and Rwanda, affecting a
total population of 150 million. By 2025, population growth will have tipped
other countries over the edge, including Ethiopia, Somalia, Uganda and the
continent’s most populous nation, Nigeria.

The desire of nations to harness their major rivers with large dams
and canals, and to prevent the waters ‘running to waste’, is understandably
strong. Water can irrigate fields, fill taps and provide electricity through
hydroelectric power projects. Africa is reckoned to have a third of the
planet’s potential to generate hydroelectricity. During the past 40 years,
the Aswan Dam on the Nile in Egypt, the Kariba and Cabora Bassa Dams on
the Zambezi and the Akosombo Dam on the Volta in Ghana became powerful symbols
of the drive for progress in newly independent Africa. But the success of
these projects has been mixed, to say the least. Big schemes don’t seem
to suit the village-based societies of Africa.

The classic story of dashed hopes concerns the Akosombo Dam. Built during
the 1960s, it was to be the engine by which President Kwame Nkrumah hoped
to transform his newly independent country into an industrial nation. It
created the world’s largest artificial lake, drowning 5 per cent of his
country. The plan was to irrigate new fields, use the power created at the
dam to smelt the nation’s large bauxite deposits and to use the manufacture
of aluminium as the springboard for industrial growth. Today, the Akosombo
Dam provides very cheap electricity for smelting aluminium. But the bauxite
comes from abroad and the smelters, owned by foreign companies, provide
little local wealth for a land becoming progressively poorer and more debt-ridden.
There has never been any money for investment in irrigation to compensate
for the drowned farmland.

In southern Africa, the Kariba Dam powers copper mines in Zambia, but
has damaged fisheries and destroyed flood plain farming. Thayer Scudder
of Clark University in the US, a lifelong analyst of African water use,
says: ‘The impact of the Kariba Dam on agriculture downstream is an excellent
example of how Man’s engineering capabilities can drastically reduce the
productivity of an existing ecosystem.’ Farther down the Zambezi, the hydroelectric
potential of the Cabora Bassa Dam in Mozambique has fallen victim to civil
war. But, says Peter Bolton of Hydaulics Research in Britain, downstream
damage to the environment has been so great that, even if power were flowing,
‘it is hard to escape the conclusion the dam should not have been built’.

Today, few of the aid agencies and banks that fund most development
projects in Africa are prepared to stump up for large dams. But national
governments often remain keen and, where there is money, the lure to think
big remains strong. But big also means vulnerable to changing climate and
changing politics.

The Aswan Dam, completed in 1970, has given Egypt almost total control
over the Nile, the world’s longest river, which has tributaries rising in
eight countries far to the south. But with that control has come a new uncertainty
for a country dependent on the river for its survival. For, as the water
needs of upstream countries grow, they will build their own dams and Egypt’s
mastery could disappear.

Egypt fears political blackmail from Ethiopia, which is the source for
85 per cent of Egypt’s water, with the waters of the Nile held as hostage.
Egypt’s minister for foreign affairs, Boutros Ghali, told an African Water
Summit in Cairo last June: ‘The national security of Egypt, which is based
on the water of the Nile, is in the hands of other African countries.’ Ghali
is famous for once declaring that ‘the next war in our region will be over
the waters of the Nile’, and a year ago his government angrily publicised
intelligence reports that Israeli engineers were at work in Ethiopia preparing
to build a dam on Lake Tana, the source of the Blue Nile.

Ghali wants to do a deal. ‘Egypt must offer something in exchange for
water,’ he told last year’s summit, ‘and this is energy.’ Egypt wants to
mastermind the creation of an international electricity supergrid, based
on dams the length of the Nile and supplying a region stretching from Turkey,
through Syria and Jordan, south to Sudan, Ethiopia and even Zaire. With
a heady zeal typical of the backers of large projects, Ghali looked forward
to developments in superconductor technology that could make transmission
lines much more efficient. Within 10 years, he said optimistically, ‘it
will cost relatively little to move electricity from Kampala to Khartoum
and Cairo.’

Egypt wants more water to irrigate more fields and so feed its fast-growing
population. It has an ambitious desert reclamation programme intended to
pour 9 cubic kilometres of Nile water annually onto 6000 square kilometres
of new fields. To do this, it wants to increase the flow of the Nile by
completing a canal through the Sudd, a vast wetland in southern Sudan. At
present, around half of the flow of the Nile evaporates in the tropical
sun as it slowly works its way through the Sudd swampland. But a canal that
could speed the flow and increase by 10 per cent or more the Nile’s average
annual flow from its current 86 cubic kilometres, sits half-completed in
the midst of the Sudd.

The Jonglei canal was being dug through the Sudd by a ‘bucket-wheel
excavator’, a giant digging machine more than 30 metres high. The job was
two-thirds complete in 1983, when rebels in Sudan’s protracted civil war
attacked the construction camp. The engineers fled, leaving the excavator
behind, and have never returned.

The project was controversial because of fears that it would disrupt
the ecology of one of the world’s greatest wetlands, halt the migration
of animals and destroy the way of life of the local Dinka people. But these
worries have not deterred Egypt and Sudan, which had agreed to share the
extra water that the canal would deliver to the Nile downstream.

Egypt is impatient for water. Ghali has little time for critics who
accuse his country of being wasteful of the water it has. He says that ‘because
of the civil war (in Sudan), Egypt is losing 5 million cubic metres of water
daily’. There were rumours in 1989 that Egypt had backed a successful coup
in Sudan in an attempt to end the civil war and allow work on the Jonglei
to resume. Ghali says only that ‘we are not helping these countries solve
their internal problems for altruistic reasons . . . we need more water,
and there is no possibility of getting more water unless there is stability
in the region’.

Water from the desert

Sudan’s political problems appear intractable, however, and Egypt may
turn to a previously untapped source of water for much of North Africa,
vast natural underground reservoirs in porous rocks beneath the sands of
the Sahara. The seven major aquifers between them probably contain around
60 000 cubic kilometres of water, much of it accumulated during a wet phase
in the Sahara’s history 8000 to 5000 years ago.

Any large-scale extraction of this ancient water amounts to water ‘mining’.
And here Libya leads the way. Under the guidance of his British consultants,
Brown and Root, Colonel Gadhafi plans to spend a total of $27 billion (more
than twice Libya’s current annual gross national product) on a scheme dubbed
the Great Man-made River Project. Several thousand kilometres of pipes large
enough for a person to walk through will carry between 2 and 3 cubic kilometres
of water each year from hundreds of boreholes sunk in the heart of the Sahara.

Wells in a region with as little as 1 centimetre of rainfall a year
can yield more than 15 000 cubic metres of water a day. The water is earmarked
by Libya to irrigate up to 3000 square kilometres of farms on the coast,
where existing wells are running dry through overuse. The first phase, from
the Sarir water field to Sirte and Benghazi, is almost complete. The Sirte
link should open in May. Last year, the government let contracts for a second
1500 kilometre pipe to feed Tripoli. The water could make Libya self-sufficient
in food but, says Tony Allan from the School of Oriental and African Studies
in London, ‘it is clear that the cost of food raised by irrigation with
the new water (will be) uneconomic’.

Like oil, the water will not last for ever. Hydrologists estimate that
recharge of all the Saharan aquifers, mostly from rain falling in hills
such as the Tibesti in northern Chad, occurs at a rate of only about 4 cubic
kilometres a year, and much of this water may be lost to evaporation from
large depressions in the desert, such as Egypt’s Qattara Depression. Recharge
of the Libyan aquifers will be much less than this. Allan reckons that water
levels in the Sarir area will fall by perhaps 2 metres per year once pumping
starts, making the water progressively more expensive to extract. In parts
of the Kufrah aquifer developed for a desert agricultural project in the
1970s, levels fell by as much as 15 metres per year, says Allan, 20 times
the rate predicted by project designers.

Recharge rates are so slow that underground water beneath the Sahara
can, in effect, only be mined once, but major rivers in the arid lands of
Africa still provide the prospect of a permament water supply. Two large
dams recently completed in Mali and Mauritania are designed to master the
sporadic seasonal flow of the River Senegal for the 1200 kilometres of river
that lies between them. Drought has caused flows in the Senegal to fall
by 25 per cent in the past 20 years, but the dams should restore the navigability
of the river as far as the port of Kayes, 900 kilometres from the coast
in landlocked Mali. Kayes has been inaccessible by boat since 1974. The
dams could also generate hydroelectric power at the upper dam, and ensure
a year-round supply of fresh water for controlled irrigation of 3000 square
kilometres of farmland.

But now that the dams are complete, the money, most of it from the French,
has run out. After an expenditure of $600 million, there is none left to
dig irrigation canals, nor to install the hydroelectric turbines and pylons
needed to generate electricity and transmit it the many hundreds of kilometres
to the population centres, nor to complete the dredging and blasting that
would finally allow ships to sail upstream to Kayes. Engineers now control
the flow of water through the upstream dam so as to mimic the flood regime
that operated before the dam was built. This allows peasant farmers to carry
on producing sorghum, their traditional crop, on seasonally flooded fields,
and keeps fish in the river.

Many development experts rejoice at this apparent disaster. Even though
the dams are built, they say, the countries that border the river would
be better off if they were left unused. Agricultural economists have seen
too many irrigation projects in Africa where farming output has fallen after
the introduction of big irrigation schemes. Sometimes the problems are scientific
and technical, such as the failure of Lake Chad to feed the South Chad project.
Too often, however, it is because the motives for the schemes have as much
to do with graft and the wielding of political patronage as a genuine desire
for national development and advancement.

A recent study of the South Chad project by Are Kolawole, a geographer
at the Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria, concluded that, even if Lake
Chad had stayed full, the project would not have succeeded. Feasibility
studies showed that plans to grow wheat and rice in this region would not
work. But in Nigeria such studies are ‘a mere formality as projects would
still be executed irrespective of the recommendations . . . The motive for
irrigation development in Nigeria is more political than commercial, economic
or technical.’

One of the best researched of these disasters is the Bakolori irrigation
project in northern Nigeria. More than £300 million was spent to
irrigate 30 000 hectares of farmland with water from the Bakolori Dam in
the Sokoto valley. As in the South Chad project, the technical consultants
used were Britain’s Mott MacDonald. According to Bill Adams, a geographer
then at the University of Cambridge, the impoundment of the water reduced
by two-thirds the extent of natural flooding downstream of the dam, on which
50 000 farmers and fishermen depended for their harvests of rice, sorghum
and fish. Until the dam was built, farmers grew two crops a year on land
that the river flooded each summer, and fishing communities thrived on fish
caught in pools as the floods subsidied. The disruption to natural hydrological
cycles and traditional farms, known as fadamas, from the Bakolori scheme
was ‘typical of what has happened to other flood plains in Africa’, says
Adams.

Ironically, after the scheme was completed in the early 1980s, Mott
MacDonald was called in again by the Nigerians to look at ways to revive
fadama farming on the newly flood-free flood plains. In Africa, ‘development’
on the Western model often appears to be an ever retreating mirage, giving
all too real meaning to the phrase ‘developed to death’.

The big question is whether large water projects in Africa are inherently
inappropriate, or have just been badly designed and operated. The contrast
with Asia is marked. Vast public irrigation works lay behind some of the
earliest Asian civilisations in Babylon and the Indus Valley. Irrigation
has always been the key to growing water-hungry crops such as rice in Asia.
That emphasis has grown with the introduction of modern high-yield varieties
of crops, which also demand high inputs of water.

Yet fully controlled irrigation remains rare in Africa. Half of the
120 000 square kilometres under formal irrigation schemes in the continent
are in Egypt and Sudan. Does the rest of Africa need a crash programme?
Or should it concentrate on improving its own traditional farming methods,
which rely on rainfall and, in drier areas, small local irrigation schemes
to supplement rainwater?

Traditional methods do not require large-scale construction projects,
they do not require foreign machinery or currency, they are less open to
large-scale graft and corruption and, above all, they fit in with the existing
social structure and technical knowledge of the farmers of the continent.
This approach, once the province of radical enthusiasts, is now the new
orthodoxy among development experts, chastened by years of expensive failures
of more ambitious projects. A study published last summer by Janusz Rydzewski
of the Institute of Irrigation Studies at the University of Southampton
is one of many that have concluded that throughout the continent ‘small-scale
irrigation can show higher returns to investment than large-scale projects’.
They also do less damage to the environment and almost invariably make more
efficient use of scarce water resources. Even the World Bank, financier
of many large irrigation schemes across the continent, is coming round.
A report from the bank on Irrigation in Sub-Saharan Africa last year concluded
that small irrigation schemes have worked best and should be given priority
in future. In an even more startling change of tack, its authors also backed
water projects based on traditional African communal ownership of land and
water.

In order to make progress in Africa, many specialists are looking backwards,
to the days before Western ideas about technology and ownership of the natural
environment took hold. Through the 1980s, as Libya planned its Great Man-made
River Project, UNESCO funded British archaeologists to explore long-forgotten
methods of farming in the desert by trapping rainwater. The brief given
to the archaeologists was ‘to assess those areas where farming might be
re-established’. They discovered that what archaeologists had assumed to
be the remains of ancient Roman garrisons, more than 300 kilometres from
the coast, were in fact farming communities set up on the edges of wadis.

Extensive systems of walls and dykes trapped flash floods and silt in
fields where plants could grow. It was, says Barri Jones, professor of archaeology
at the University of Manchester, ‘a complex system of water and soil management
based on detailed local knowledge of water flows’. He believes it could
be successfully tried in parts of the Libyan Desert today.

Similar discoveries are being made all over the world. And many ancient
systems are being revived. Israeli researchers have reconstructed ancient
farms in the Negev Desert and now grow crops on them. In the Thar Desert,
the Indian government is constructing new khadins, traditional structures
for trapping water and silt in depressions in sand dunes.

From Iran to Morocco, researchers have found thousands of qanats, tunnels
that extract underground water trapped inside alluvium on valley floors.
Qanats are frequently several kilometres long, a sophisticated piece of
mining dug with the aid of vertical shafts. Many of them have only recently
been abandoned, replaced by water piped from expensive dams without officials
ever knowing the ancient tunnels existed.

David Gilbertson of the department of archaeology at the University
of Sheffield, author of a lengthy study of traditional water-collecting
methods for the journal Applied Geography in 1986, says: ‘The frequency
of ancient settlements in the semi-arid lands of North Africa, Arabia, South
and Central America and the southwest United States suggests that the wisdom
of the ancients in managing these harsh landscapes was more substantive
than our own.’

Gilbertson says that fewer examples of ancient water collecting wisdom
have been uncovered in Africa than elsewhere. But there is hope. In drought-prone
Burkina Faso, Oxfam’s field officers, enthused by seeing water harvesting
experiments in Israel, have encouraged local farmers to build low stone
walls across their land to trap rainwater on their fields. From small beginnings
in one village, the idea has spread in the past decade to more than 300
villages. Gilbertson himself offers one example from the dry lands around
Lake Chad, 400 kilometres east of the Niger capital of Niamey. Here the
Bellas, former slaves, settled after the 1973 drought. They built tiny water-collecting
structures for their sorghum crops by piling up soil round each plant. These
‘microcatchments’ are, literally, of human dimensions. ‘The size and shape
of the plots enables construction by one man, who can reach half a circle
round him with his arm to shovel earth,’ says Gilbertson. When he wrote,
15 000 had been built.

It is hard to imagine a greater contrast between these semicircles in
the sand and the grand plans to tap the Zaire and pour its waters into the
Sahel. One would cost billions of dollars and measure its yield in cubic
kilometres. The other costs an hour or so’s labour and might collect a litre
of rainwater, if and when it rains. But many would guess that the microcatchments
stand a greater chance of leading Africa away from its water crisis.

Fred Pearce is an environmental journalist. He is currently writing
a book on the politics of water.