(Pablo Tosco/AFP)
Burkina Faso’s interim president, Captain Ibrahim Traoré, spoke late last year of the conflicts blighting his country and much of his region. He described the situation in Burkina Faso as predictable, given the endemic weaknesses in governance. Of particular note was his focus on water.
Traoré delivered these remarks to political parties, civil society organisations and traditional leaders, to raise awareness of Burkina Faso’s rapidly degrading security situation.
He described seeing people in the Southwest, Northwest and Sahel regions including in towns like Gorom-Gorom, Tinasane and Markoye, carrying jerry cans to fetch water. This led him to question why there were no development projects in these impoverished regions. The people walk, he lamented, for kilometres to get water for the cattle. There are no roads for trucks to transport feed for livestock, he said, before referring to the Kongoussi-Djibo bridge built in the 1950s that has fallen into such dilapidation that it can no longer support the trucks that would otherwise take the now rotting local produce to market. All this, he said, because of a lack of investment in the construction and the maintenance of essential infrastructure.
His speech depicts a reality across the Sahel region where terrorist attacks have been rampant since 2012, following Muammar Gaddafi’s assassination and the subsequent looting of Libya’s weapons deposits. Many villages have since been abandoned in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, with thousands of people having been displaced. There is no adequate government intervention to curb the violence.
Because clean drinking water is a basic need, lack of access to it triggers many problems at every level of society. Villages are located close to waterways to allow for the smooth provisioning of water, as well as the practice of gardening to produce food which can be consumed and sold.
With the rise of terrorist attacks mostly in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso but reaching coastal countries such as Côte d’Ivoire, Togo and Benin, many villages have been abandoned or are under the control of armed groups who impose their own rules on local people. Displaced populations are deprived of their traditional water sources, be they natural water courses, standpipes or boreholes, cutting off their water supply and therefore the access to their means of physical and economic sustenance.
“They lay down the law for the management and use of water and other natural resources by delimiting areas to be exploited,” said a local elected authority to me in a terrorist dominated zone in the Central-Southern part of Mali, adding, “The cultivable areas are reduced and they [terrorist groups] occupy the wooded areas suitable for agriculture and which contain the local water reserves.”
The chiefs of villages occupied under duress are obliged to cooperate with these groups. They are therefore the preferred interlocutors of all those who “seek permission to operate” in these controlled areas. The opinion of the village chief is conditional to the prior agreement of the group to which the village belongs. There are negotiations with these terrorist groups before any projects or partners are allowed to enter the territory.
The reality in Sahelian countries is that successive governments since independence have concentrated their “administration” on urban areas. But once you leave the urban areas the populations are left to their own devices with an administration that is more oppressive and not in the least concerned with providing sustainable responses to the development needs of these localities.
The agents of the land registry (customs), law enforcement (police, gendarmes), and nature protection (water and forests) are quicker to find ways to participate in racketeering than to offer the poor the services they require.
“We have lost a lot of funding which has been transferred to other localities deemed more accessible,” said a local government official in one of the areas. “Given the fact that the groups themselves need to have privileged access to drinking water, they facilitate the arrival of certain partners to install water supply systems.”
Global Water Partnership West Africa is implementing the European Union funded project Water for Growth and Poverty Reduction in the Mekrou Sub-catchment in Niger, but it was not able to launch the project as planned in August 2020 because of a terrorist attack in which eight people were killed. Water management and development is but one of many sectors affected by terrorist activities in the region, but water, unlike some other sectors, is a matter of survival.
There is a critical need to enhance and improve the governance of water resources and land while ensuring that required investments are put in place to sustainably respond to the water related development needs of people living in urban and rural areas at all levels in Sahelian countries.
Armand Houanye has been the Regional Executive Secretary of the Global Water Partnership in West Africa (GWP-WA) since October 2017. He is in charge of the development, planning and coordination of GWP-WA operations across 15 West African countries with a focus on integrated drought management, water climate and development, gender, and water for growth and poverty reduction.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Mail & Guardian.