OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso, March 14 (IPS) – The writer is the Regional Executive Secretary of the Global Water Partnership Association in West Africa (GWP-WA)Interim President of Burkina Faso Ibrahim Traoré delivers a speech late last year about the conflicts currently ravaging his country and much of his region. He describes the situation in Burkina Faso as predictable due to endemic weaknesses in management that he believes have led to many young people abandoning the economy, especially outside the regions. city.
He made these remarks on 13 November to political parties, civil society organizations and traditional and customary leaders in Ouagadougou to raise awareness of the deteriorating security situation. fast by Burkina Faso. Note in particular that his focus is on water, as he describes seeing people across the Southwest, Northwest and Sahel regions including Gorom-Gorom, Tinasane and Markoye carrying jerry cans for water.
This makes him question why there are no development projects in these impoverished areas. People, he lamented, walk for miles to collect water for livestock that died along the way.
There was no road for trucks to even transport fodder to sustain livestock, he reflected, before mentioning that the Kongoussi-Djibo road bridge built in the 1950s had fallen into disrepair. to the point where it can no longer support the passing trucks. now rotting local produce to market.
All he said was the lack of investment in the construction and maintenance of essential infrastructure.
His speech described a reality across the Sahel region, where terrorist attacks have been rampant since 2012, following the assassination of Mouammar Kadhafi and later the robbery of Libya’s arsenal. Since then, many villages have been abandoned in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, with thousands displaced without proper government intervention to curb the violence.
Since clean drinking water is a basic need, the lack of access to it causes problems at all levels of society. Traditionally, villages were located close to waterways to allow for a favorable water supply, as well as the practice of gardening to produce the basic ingredients for food that could be consumed and sold for cash. community.
With the rise of terrorist attacks mainly in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso but has spread to coastal countries such as Côte d’Ivoire, Togo and Benin, Many villages have been abandoned or under the control of armed terrorist groups, who impose their own rules and orders on the local population.
Displaced residents are deprived of their traditional water sources, be it natural streams, risers or boreholes, cut off the water supply and thus have no access to maintenance facilities. their physical and economic well-being.
“They make laws for the management and use of water and other natural resources by delineating the areas where they are mined,” said a local government elected to me in a terrorist-dominated area in In the south-central part of Mali, it added, “the arable areas are reduced and they occupy densely wooded areas suitable for agriculture and as a reservoir for local water reserves.”
Village chiefs occupied under duress were obliged to cooperate with these groups. They are therefore the preferred interlocutors of all “permits to operate” in these controlled areas.
The village chief’s opinion is subject to the prior consent of the group to which the village belongs. There are real negotiations with these terrorist groups before any projects or partners are allowed into the territory.
The reality in the Sahelian states is generally that successive governments since independence have concentrated their “administration” on urban areas. But once you leave urban areas, people will be left with their own devices with a more oppressive government and least interested in providing sustainable responses to development needs. development of these regions.
Land registries (customs), law enforcement (police, gendarmerie) and nature protection (water and forest) agencies are more quick to find ways to engage in fraud than to provide for people. poor for the services they require.
“We lost a lot of funding that went to other localities that were supposed to be more accessible,” a local government official explained to me recently in one of the gated areas. He added: “Since the groups themselves need to have privileged access to drinking water, they make it possible for some partners to come and install the water supply system.
GWP West Africa in progress European Union-funded project “water for growth and poverty alleviation in the Mekrou sub-basin in Niger” but could not implement the project as planned in August 2020 due to problems The terrorist attack left eight people dead.
Water management and development is just one of many areas affected by terrorist activities in the region, but water, unlike some others, is a matter of survival.
Therefore, there is a need to strengthen and improve the management of water and land resources while ensuring that the necessary investments are made to sustainably meet the water-related development needs of the people. live in urban and rural areas at all levels in the Sahelian countries.
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