To meaningfully wrap up my term-long exploration of water's political entanglements across the African continent, I wish to dedicate this space to reflect upon key takeaways as well as how my final posts' themes may have progressed and differed from the angle laid out in my introductory post.
Diversity
Although the Orange-Senqu river basin formed an early focus, attempts were made to acknowledge issues and opportunities elsewhere, from the integration of the virtual water trade in the Maghreb and continental groundwater endowment variations, to balancing sectoral stakeholders in urban sanitation and water provisioning in Nairobi. After all, whilst the notion of Africa's natural environmental characteristics influencing its hydrological landscape plays a part in all countries' water woes, each country's specific challenges are unique. The continent's sheer size and diversity also presents differing political and socio-demographic climates, producing nuances in its water challenges that certainly can't be explained through a one-size-fits-all approach (Wainaina, 2005). By no means was this blog's foci exhaustive in reflecting all nuances, but I hope it proffered a balance between depth and breadth.
Revisiting a neglected motif
You may also have noticed that the motif of colonial legacies complicating water politics, which I raised in my introduction, did not end up featuring heavily. However, its relative lack of explicit mentioning certainly does not imply minimal significance.
For example, the LHWP has its roots in a 1950s British-funded study under the Southern African High Commissioner, investigating the suitability of Lesotho's rivers to divert and extract water from Lesotho. It identified a large-scale transfer project in the form of the LHWP to be the 'most economical' method of directly meeting South Africa's water needs. Since its conception, the project has therefore inherently favoured South Africa's economic and industrial agenda, reinforcing the idea of its power held, and 'hydrocolonisation', over Lesotho that fails to prioritise its long-term (population) growth.
Further, poor and artificial colonial planning also fuelled the spatial unevenness in sanitation across cities. Cape Town's townships, where residents have repeatedly demonstrated against the lack of basic sanitation infrastructure, are engineered to be impoverished and disconnected from formal piped networks owing to discriminatory Apartheid policies. British administrative presence around Nairobi also created a highly pocketed and spatially uneven city, with sharp spatial contrasts between formal and informal settlements and their infrastructural connectedness.
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| Figure 1: Sharp spatial contrasts between the formal and informal settlements like Kibera here in Nairobi are a direct consequence of colonial urban planning, leading to infrastructural and sanitation inequalities still evident today (Source). |
Scale
Throughout, I adopted a predominantly inter-state, ‘hydropolitical’ perspective to water and politics. It became evident that whether we tackle the topic through the basin level, underground (groundwater), or even invisibly (virtual water), the issue of uneven and inequitable water allocation cannot be addressed easily, and definitely not unilaterally. Regional political cooperation, supported by an integrated approach resilient to the dynamicity brought about by anthropogenic climate change, presents a promising approach - one reflected in ORASECOM's basin-level principles, and potentially from which groundwater management can draw.
As the last post has shown, water politics transcends state-level actors, applying to community-level stakeholders mediating amongst themselves. The politics of water is thus a multi-scalar issue, underscored by the central issues of allocation and access - whether for sanitation and toilets or physical water reserves - which is fundamentally infused with politics, and not simply the illusive notion of supply.
This marks the end of my blog series - thank you for reading and I hope you gained interesting insights into this fascinating topic, because I certainly did.
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