Lake Chad was once an incredibly important stop on West-East trade route through Africa, but today the area has faded into international obscurity; gaining the reputation as "The Dead Heart of Africa". The lake was once quite large straddling the nations of Chad, Niger, Nigeria and Cameroon, but since 1960 the surface area of the lake has shrunk by almost 90%, with that 10% remaining having to support 30 million people. The situation is causing unrest, panic and instability, and where you find instability you will always find people looking to exploit it.
On the panel this week to discuss the crisis on Lake Chad were >>
TOMASZ ROLBIECKI - (University of Gdansk)
VINCENT FOUCHER - (CNRS)
JOHN CAMPBELL - (Fmr US Ambassador to Nigeria)
Each of the four Lake Chad nations view the lake in completely different ways, and each of the four has different problems radiating from the area. The Republic of Chad is the most reliant on the lake of the four, with the capital N'Djamena only 100km south of the lake. The people of Chad rely on this lake heavily for food, water and transport, but with the lake shrinking quickly competition for resources is becoming tense; with warlords taking up arms to secure parts of the lake for themselves. The French for many years have worked to keep Chad as stable as possible to prevent a bloody power vacuum, but N'djamena's grip on large parts of the country is slipping away.
Niger also shares the lake, but the lake is 1,200km from its capital all the way across the desert. Niger is probably the least stable of the 4 Lake Chad nations, with Niameys control more akin to an archipelago of government rule than a cohesive nation. Many terrorist units such as ISIS in Africa, and Boko Haram use the areas around Lake Chad and the South-East of Niger to train and build up for strikes into Nigeria and the Niger heartland. To combat this US Africa command has based a fairly large regional drone program in the center of the Niger desert around Agadez, where they carry out reconnaissance and drone strikes usually in support of the French African forces fight against Boko Haram and ISIA.
Boko Haram came to international attention a few years ago when they kidnapped 276 schoolgirls from Northern Nigeria, and ever since the government in Abuja has been working hard to crush the terrorist unit. A few years ago they even attempted a large-scale offensive to finally break them, bringing in large numbers of South African mercenaries to inflict some serious punishments upon the Boko Haram groups. Boko Haram though was not defeated, just scattered throughout the region with operations now spanning from Mali to Chad. What was once an almost exclusively Nigerian problem is now a regional problem.
Nigeria needs a stable North East (the Lake Chad region) for a number of reasons, the first of which being oil. Although Nigeria has quite large offshore reserves on its Southern coast, the oil in the NE would be far cheaper to extract; but also more dangerous to infrastructure with the terrorism rampant in the area. The country also sits on a religious divide with the Christians and Catholics based in the far greener south, and the Muslims based in the much dryer North. Every large scale operation Abuja launches against groups like ISIS in Africa or Boko Haram is often perceived by people living in the North as attacks on the Muslim North, ratcheting up the regional tensions. This forces the Nigerian government into this fine balancing act of pushing hard enough against the terrorist units to limit their ability to cause damage, whilst not going so hard as to alienate half of the country. The last thing anyone wants to do in any of these 4 nations is risk a civil war, which is probably the main reason these long term dictators in Chad and Cameroon receive military and financial support from Paris. The French do want to risk any sort of power vacuum, and seem to have adopted a "better the devil you know" policy when it comes to the region.
The main issue through is global, with climate change quickly shrinking the available resources on the lake. The people who live off of the lake are scared, frustrated, and see nothing but inaction coming from their capitals; to these people a group like Boko Haram might seem like the only possibility for real change?
I would love to get your thoughts on this?
Human Rights group lawyers have filed a legal case against big chocolate companies like Mars, Nestlé, and Hershey charging complicity in child forced labor and trafficking, on Friday.
The case has been registered in Washington by a human rights law firm International Rights Advocates (IRA) on part of eight children.
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