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G21 AFRICA - TO LIVE & DIE FOR WATER: SIMIYU BARASA speakes to our Focus Issue of 2006.
Nairobi, KENYA - When Waangari Maathai made Kenya proud by winning the Nobel peace prize, many the world over were aghast. What has an environmentalist have to do with peace? If only they knew that natural resources like water mean violent, very unpeaceful death in Kenya they would ensure that the many lives lost due to fighting for water in arid and semi-arid areas of most African countries are not a recurring tragedy. But no, water has never meant a big issue to many, especially since it can be bought in tiny bottles in supermarkets. Unless when it means international war, like when former UN secretary General Boutros Boutros Ghali gave a BBC Radio 4 interview expressing fears that military confrontation between countries of the Nile basin was "almost inevitable". This was news; suddenly water was cause for international attention, and no wonder NGOs got together from as early as 1999 to form the Nile Basin Initiative that spans across ten A frican states.
Simiyu Barasa Forget the interstate conflicts that draw international attention, there is much more confrontation going on among the various ethnic communities in Kenya that is not getting adequate attention. The attention here is not even about international gasps and oh my Gods, but even from local Kenyans themselves sitting back and taking stock of what is happening.
The recent drought that hit Kenya since mid-2005 has made the search for water a vicious undertaking with fatal results. Herders from neighboring Ethiopia recently clashed with Kenya's Turkana tribesmen over water points, leading to the death of 40 people. In Isiolo 9 people died in inter-clan clashes over water and pasture. The Turkana and Uganda's Karamajong have torched huts and grazing lands of each other and Marsabit and Mandera districts have seen deadly confrontations spring up now and then.
In March last year, at least 30 people were reported killed in inter-clan war over water in Mandera, with 16 of the fatalities being children. In January 2005, more than twenty people were killed in two weeks of violence that rocked Kenya's Rift Valley province after the Maasai pastrolists vandalized water pipes belonging to Kikuyu farmers, claiming they were diverting water from the Ewaso Kedong River to irrigate their farms and hence leaving none for the herders and their cattle.
Why does this have to be the case? Simple. "Nomadic communities now have to travel hundreds of kilometres in search of pasture, often taking them into areas controlled by other communities" Oxfam, a British Aid Agency, says through its Kenyan head, Gezahegn Kebede in an article "Kenyan Drought fuels Nomad Clashes."
Oxfam is onsite helping more than 200, 000 people with food and water in the Turkana region. Yet there is the Ministry of Water Resources and the National Water Conversation and Pipeline Cooperation and private companies mandated to ensure equitable distribution of safe water.
The statistics are even more disillusioning. Over 50 percent of the rural population in Kenya and more than 25 percent of the urban population have no access to clean water, yet the water ministry gurgles 13% of the total government expenditure annually. Non-governmental agencies add to the sleaze by sinking millions of dollars into supplementing government efforts, but the conflicts continue, and the major excuse is that "water is not enough."
Water is not enough seems to be a joke to explain this loss of life as a study by John Hopkins School of Public Health established that Kenya has a total water potential of 20.29 billion cubic metres against a projected demand of about 2.3 billion cubic metres in 2000 and 3.56 billion cubic metres in 2010, meaning we have ten times more water than we need.
"At the national scale we have too much water. The big problem is at the local level as a result of seasonal variations and spatial distribution of the resources," it says, predicting that even by 2010 Kenya will be using only 28% of total water potential for all its needs. Optimistically titled Solutions for a Water-Short World, it ironically spells doom saying that Kenya is among five countries likely to run short of water in the next twenty five years, the other four being Nigeria (oha ma Gowd!, Oga!) Ethiopia, India and Peru. Welcome to the third world.
The World of Wastage
To have so much water in Kenya and so much water related violent deaths is obscene, if not an embarrassment. Apart from government sleaze, there is also the class segregation where rural areas, from which most water is piped, have no water pipe network worth talking about as urban, upper crust neighborhoods have water flowing out of mazes of sprinklers in their gardens.
In most areas, vandalism is the order of the day, especially in middle class urban towns. Residents of Langata estates, Nyayo Highrise, South C and other Nairobi estates have to buy water from vendors who vandalize the main water supply lines so the water does not flow into houses and connect their pipes at strategic points for maximum business of selling the same residents water. This water, since it is not paid for by the vandalisers to any authority, is left running, and no wonder such water selling points are surrounded by trenches of spilt water. Per year this is thousands of litres wasted, water that a Maasai herdsman would have loved to have instead of killing his neighbour for drinking from his drying reservoir.
Everytime we turn on the water and leave it to spill unchecked, we as Kenyans should spare a thought at such wastage and realize that someone's life is also literally going down the drain.
The more than 5, 000 villagers that have been forced to flee from their El Golicha village due to water wars in Marsabit wouldn't suffer if we conserved our water so as to make it easier for water to be redistributed to under-supplied and under-endowed areas.
The over 20,000 residents of Mandera displaced by water clashes in Mandera would not be there. We do not need to sit yelling that we are still waiting for the government to implement the 1992 Water Master Plan that proposed a watering hole for every 25 square Kilometres in arid and semi-arid lands so as to stop the killings.
The power is in us. By making sure that every drop that we use goes into real good use. Because the more we spill, some one's last drops of blood are also spilling, and death claims one more for its own. As death is the thirstiest of us all.
© 2006, GENERATOR 21.
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