By Charles Onyango-Obbo

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Every month or so there is a report about Lake Nalubaale (aka Lake Victoria) groaning under the weight of pollution and a slow death.

The latest just came from France24, vividly reminding us of how Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania have turned the world’s second-largest freshwater lake into a large, open sewer.

It is not that the East Africans who live along Lake Victoria don’t love it. Rather, it is a great example of the tragedy of the commons.

In this tragedy, the Ugandan, Kenyan and Tanzanian governments continue to let industries, and the lakeside communities without formal sewage infrastructure, dump human waste, fertilisers, garbage and plastic waste in Lake Victoria. In the process, they are killing the main provider of food and livelihoods of the same communities and courting environmental disasters that could destabilise the countries themselves.

We have been here for long, so the question is what new thing can be done. In this regard, Isaac Okero, former president of the Law Society of Kenya, is an unlikely trailblazer.

Last year, he and four others sued the Uganda government, the East African Community Secretary-General, and the Lake Victoria Basin Commission for allegedly failing to control floods around the shores of Lake Victoria, resulting in the displacement of people and damage of their property.

In July this year, the East African Court of Justice threw out their case. In their action was a key signal. The time has come to create international laws on nature so that one can sue Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania, or pick which one of them is more rogue, and charge them with genocide against a natural resource critical for the survival of millions of people.

In this tragedy, the Ugandan, Kenyan and Tanzanian governments continue to let industries, and the lakeside communities without formal sewage infrastructure, dump human waste, fertilisers, garbage and plastic waste in Lake Victoria.

But that should be the last resort. There are less extreme tools that could be explored. For one, international law needs to be established to make it easier for anyone to sue polluting companies in a world court.

A more creative approach can be found in the British Columbia halibut fishery, which is regulated jointly by the US and Canada. The halibut fish stocks were saved by the fishery being partly privatised.

Concessioning chunks of Lake Victoria to private operators might do the trick. My preference would be to create a unified, semi-autonomous territory, say the Nyanza or Nalubaale Aquatic Republic, to govern the lake with the 50 million who depend on it as its citizens. The Nalubaale Republic could pay tribute fees, say $250 million a year, to each of the three countries, for commercial custodianship of the lake.

But then again, maybe one shouldn’t despair. The report covered a youthful NGO, Friends of Lake Victoria, who are working with local communities to reduce pollution of the waters.

Optimistic, bright-eyed, and articulate, Michelle Muchilwa, a member of the NGO, declared: “It is possible to bring [the lake] back because we have seen ecosystems around the world rebound when people learn to leave them alone, and when the pollution stops.”

She didn’t look to be even of legal drinking age. The future might just be in less ecologically destructive hands.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer, and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. Twitter@cobbo3