Introduction into Water and Politics in Africa

 

Welcome to my Blog!

The theme I have chosen to base my blog posts around are water and politics. The supply of water wherever in the world is almost certainly entangled in some sort of political issues and conflict. In order for there to be consistency and stability in water and the availability of it, there has to be political stability as well. The two, it could be argued are dependent on each other in order to function sustainably. In Africa, across the 900 million inhabitants the continent is home to, the issue of water availability and access is a persistent problem in some countries. Problems in the past and presently range from the well-known dispute between Egypt and Ethiopia over the well-provisioned development of water from the River Nile, to local political issues in Port Harcourt in Nigeria. Transboundary issues over water resources, whether this is surface water or even groundwater are one of the biggest causes of conflict in Africa. 

The continent of Africa heavily relies on groundwater resources to meet the growing demands of water due to its various benefits of protection against pathogenic contamination and climate variability and slower reactions to meteorological conditions (MacDonald et al., 2012). The map below shows all of the areas that have groundwater storage within Africa. However, the failure of providing this quantitative information on groundwater resources in Africa, means that many potential resources go unnoticed or utilised to their maximum potential. This in itself can be a political problem, as it is the failure of national and regional governments to provide this information. Although it should also be noted that not all of the groundwater is always available to be extracted. 

Map of groundwater storage in Africa

However, the issues surrounding water availability, accessibility and provision is a complex situation. There are some countries that have very little access to water, who do not suffer from water scarcity, whereas others have plenty of renewable freshwater resources available for everyone but lack the basic investments in water infrastructures to fully utilise the resources that are available to them (Damkjaer and Taylor, 2017). The question of why this is the case can hopefully be answered using case studies in my future blog posts. 

I must also confess that having read Wainaina's short article, 'How to Write About Africa,' that perfectly encapsulates all the classical anecdotes people use when writing or talking about Africa, that I myself have fallen victim to this in the past. Through my posts in this blog, I hope to steer away from these stereotypical tropes, which include vaguely blaming the West for Africa's failure to rapidly undergo development and avoiding the use of African scholars and their work (Wainaina, 2005).

Wherever there is water in the world, the issue of accessibility to it will always be subjective to political factors (Damkjaer and Taylor, 2017). I look forward to expanding on this theory in my next few blogs!

See you soon!