Drought in Nigeria

BBC.com - Low harvestsake of water scarcity fit cause food shortage for Nigeria

On 16 June, a few days ago, the BBC reported an interesting new way that the Ministry of Agriculture in Nigeria is trying to approach the lack of water. The whole of Nigeria, with the largest population across the whole continent possibly approaching 240 million people, is experiencing serious drought.

The problem has been common across most countries of the Sahel, the very long stretch of land that borders on the Sahara desert, from west Africa in Mauritania to East Africa in South Sudan. The desert has been expanding at a faster rate than ever leading to more consequences for everyone across this enormous area.

Sedentary farmers in recent generations have found the lack of water and the disappearance of fertile land impossible to survive,  have gone back to being nomadic. The World Bank has named this phenomenon ‘Reverse Genesis’. It conjured up apocalyptic days in the evolution of human history.

Nigeria is one of the largest producers of oil in the world, with some of the largest reserves avoid anywhere. Yet the country is beset by corruption and it has to import refined oil because too many leakages, in both literal and figurative terms, are happening in the oilfields.

Oil revenues could’ve been used to build an infrastructure of water reservoirs to conserve and manage water shortages, a phenomenon that has afflicted the area for the best part of the last 50 years. Oil could have been used to set up desalination plans to transform seawater into drinking water. Neither of these measures that could have benefited the vast majority of the people of the country, Rural based communities across the country, could have hugely benefitted.

But the Ministry of Agriculture as issued a note to all staff asking them to pray for rain. We don’t know yet what the results might turn out to be, but some of us feel that it is somewhat unusual, so unusual that the traditional ways of building the right structure should have been tried before resorting to prayers.