Fresh hope! And a lot of it looms large for Lake Victoria, the world’s second largest expanse of fresh water after Lake Superior of North America. At depths of between 60 and 95 metres, the Equator-straddling lake covers a total 68,000 square kilometres in the three East African states of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania.
Although on the Kenyan side the lake surface is only 6.120 square kilometres (out of Kenya’s total land area of 500,000 square kilometres), the Lake Victoria basin accounts for half of the country’s fresh water. The River Tana basin, which drains in the Indian Ocean, accounts for two-thirds.
The second phase of the Lake Victoria Environmental Management Programme (LVEMP) has become a pet topic for Kenyan scientists and World Bank officials discussing restoration plans for the water body.
II is the proposed sequel to a similar five-year project, which officially ended in June 2002. The financier, the World Bank and the Global Environment Facility (GEF), allowed a three-year transition (mopping up) to run till December 2005.
To understand the lake’s dilemma, picture this scenario. It is the year 42004 AD. The descendants of a lake-fishing community saunter across vast swamps to plant rice and, in the much drier areas, maize.
But probably unknown to them is the fact that the expansive land was once a giant lake with interminable fish yields for their ancestors.
The year 42004 is too distant a future to worry the present generation, and the scenario sounds almost like the title of a futuristic novel. But it is the scientifically estimated dooms