If the Lake Victoria fisheries were well governed, they would not only restore fish stocks but also result in two-and-half times more earnings — of the order of $180 million — and improved livelihoods, exports, economic growth, and fish food security. Photo/JACOB OWITI
The recent controversial meeting of high-powered delegations from Kenya and Uganda held on Migingo island was to have been a follow-up to an earlier one that took place at Kampala’s Munyonyo Speke Resort.
Both meetings were aimed at resolving the dispute over the island’s ownership, but the second meeting ended in disharmony and confusion.
In the joint communiqué issued after the two-day Munyonyo meeting last month, the governments of Kenya and Uganda agreed to resolve the dispute.
They said a survey of the boundary between the two countries would be done by May 13.
This process will be guided by the Order in Council of 1926 and Schedules to the Uganda Constitution of 1995 and the Kenyan Constitution of 1963.
Other issues agreed upon were “an immediate withdrawal of all security forces from the island to create an enabling environment to carry out a joint boundary survey,” and an end to the harassment of fishermen from both countries.
Immediately after the meeting, both sides issued confusing statements. Kenya claimed that an agreement had been signed in which Uganda handed over the disputed island. Uganda issued a statement with similar claims.
Last week, the two presidents met in Lusaka, Zambia, for a trade meeting. Moments before they returned home, they resolved that a solution be sought immediately and within the agreement signed recently by the two countries.
Under the deal, there was to be immediate withdrawal of all security forces from the island to create an enabling environment to carry out a joint border survey.
The dispute over Migingo’s ownership is about sovereignty, fishing rights, joint exploitation of a common natural resource, the procrastination over marking boundaries, and the role of the East African Community in promoting regional peace and integration.
This is spiced with a pinch of Kenyan politics to create a volatile conflict situation that could have far-reaching ramifications.
Migingo island, measuring a mere acre of land full of rocks and located 10km off Sori Bay in Karungu Division, in Migori district, is one of the smallest of the hundreds of islands in Lake Victoria.
However, it is one of the richest in fish population.
Migingo is the major source of livelihood for Kenyan fishermen and surrounding communities in the districts of Kenya bordering Lake Victoria.
More than a densely populated rock with shacks, Migingo is a business base for nationals from Somalia, Sudan, Tanzania and Congo, as well as Kenya and Uganda.
Lake Victoria is shared between the three original members of the East African Community — Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania.
It can best be described as both the heart of the EAC and the basic binding physical feature that defines the region.
This 68,800-square kilometre lake, the world’s second-largest freshwater water body after Lake Baikal in Siberia, provides a direct source of livelihood for an estimated 30 million people.
And some 42,000 fishermen on the lake make at least $72 million a year from exports of the Nile perch.
Lake Victoria is also the source of the River Nile, a lifeline for millions in Egypt, Sudan and Uganda.
Additionally, the lake serves as an alternative trade route for Uganda through the ports of Dar es Salaam and Mwanza.
Lake Victoria provides the best opportunity for regional co-operation and management of common resources.
However, the growing mismanagement of the lake has far-reaching consequences in terms of depletion of fisheries, threats to livelihoods through job losses, interference in power supplies, food insecurity and potential armed confrontations between the countries in the region.
The lake, in fact, is a classic case of Garrett Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons.” Overfishing has caused a 34 per cent drop in the population of the Nile perch.
Besides unscrupulous fishing with gear that depletes fish stocks and other marine species, the lake is a dump for industrial and urban effluent from Kisumu, Kampala and Mwanza, according to the Kenya Marine and Fisheries Research Institute.
The row over Migingo has also overshadowed a critical concern about the poor fisheries governance on Lake Victoria raised by a World Bank-sponsored report: “The Sunken Billion: The economic justification for fisheries reform.
This report points out that the poor management of the lake’s resources is causing revenue losses of nearly $44 million a year, equivalent to 61 per cent of the $72 million in revenues obtained from Nile perch catches in the three countries.
If the Lake Victoria fisheries were well governed, they would not only restore fish stocks but also result in two-and-half times more earnings — of the order of $180 million — and improved livelihoods, exports, economic growth, and fish food security.
In essence, the row over Migingo is a scramble for the depleting Nile perch stocks.
According to Kenya’s Fisheries Minister, Patrick Otuoma, the boundary conflict is more about “economics of livelihood” for the “more than 35 million people in the riparian communities from the region that depend on the lake directly for their source of livelihood.”
Both Tanzania and Uganda have in the past arrested Kenyan fishermen for illegally fishing in their waters. Kenya has only 6 per cent of the lake, compared with Tanzania’s 49 per cent and Uganda’s 45 per cent.
However, marine studies show that fish breed on the Kenyan side of the lake and swim over to Uganda and Tanzania waters after hatching.
Attempts to address the Migingo dispute so far have fallen short of being effective mainly because politicians are spearheading them.
Kenyan politicians are swiftly becoming notorious for grandstanding and political opportunism — and their jostling for the presidency could well prevent an amicable solution to the problem.
The March 27 meeting on Migingo that ended in acrimony proved that in this situation, politicians, with their approach to conflict resolution as a zero-sum game, can do more harm than good.
Both sides are acting as if they have never faced a similar crisis in their past history.
But in 1970, Kenya successfully addressed a similar conflict with Ethiopia over the water points and wells on their common border.
In June that year, President Jomo Kenyatta and Haile Selassie signed a boundary agreement that resolved disputes over, in particular, the Qadaduma wells, which were awarded to Ethiopia, and the Godoma wells, which went to Kenya.
This agreement is regarded as a model of border dispute resolution, as it contains a protocol that guarantees the transfrontier watering and grazing rights around the two wells of the pastoralist communities in the two countries.
Although the motivation for Kenya and Ethiopia to enter into this treaty was the common threat the two countries then faced from Somalia, which had irredentist claims on their territories, the rapport between Kenyatta and Selassie greatly contributed to the quick resolution of the saga.
Kenya and Uganda do not have such a common threat to their territorial sovereignty, but they do have strong historical, economic and cultural ties, including membership of regional organisations such as EAC, Igad and Comesa. In other words, Kenya is Uganda’s closest ally and vice versa.
Besides being each other’s biggest trading partners, the symbiosis engendered by Uganda depending on Mombasa port to import and export its goods could be strengthened when Kenya starts buying oil from Uganda. In a nutshell, it is irrational for the two countries to go to war over a one-acre rock.
Those on either side of the border calling for a military solution need to be reminded of how Ethiopia and Eritrea destroyed their economic, cultural and historical relationship when they went to war over a desolate village called Badme in 1998.
This war claimed more than 70,000 lives, displaced thousands, cost billions of dollars, severely weakened the two countries’ economies and disrupted a booming bilateral trade.
Although the war formally ended in December 2000 when a peace agreement was signed in Algiers, a cold war has persisted due to the failure to agree on the border demarcation.
This cold war is now undermining peace and stability in the Horn of Africa through either side’s support of rebel groups.
Resolving the Migingo dispute is a simple and straightforward exercise. First, presidents Kibaki and Museveni must meet under the aegis of one of the regional organisations or the African Union to agree on the basic principles of addressing the dispute.
Among these will be to commit to survey, demarcate and maintain their common borders under a strict timeline.
A technical team composed of representatives from both countries, with the regional body, the AU and the UN, acting as guarantors of the agreement, will then carry out this exercise.
The survey map that will be generated by this team will later be annexed to the final boundary treaty that will be signed by the two presidents.
In the meantime, the process of resolving the Migingo dispute must be immediately removed from the dockets of politicians and handed over to the experts — cartographers, historians, lawyers and political scientists.
Migingo not only highlights the divisive legacy of colonial boundaries and the potential for conflicts over the sharing of trans-boundary resources, but also the lack of mechanisms to address border disputes in East Africa.
Dr Wafula Okumu is a senior research fellow at the Institute for Security Studies, Pretoria, South Africa. E-mail: [email protected]
