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Issue 00534 |
September 6 - 12, 2008 |
issn 0856 - 9135 |
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Front Page 2 |
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Mwanga residents mourn Lake Jipe imminent demise By Valentine Marc Nkwame Residents of Mwanga District in Kilimanjaro region are crying. One of their major sources of income is shrinking away. Lake Jipe faces more demise now than it ever did. Water hyacinths apparently are the latest addition to the various environmental factors that continue to eat up more parts of Lake Jipe, in Kilimanjaro region reducing both the size and the number of endangered Tilapia fish species. Lake Jipe, is a freshwater lake located in the boarder between Kenya and Tanzania, and the only home for the entire world population of the native Tilapia fish, known zoologically as, Oreochromis jipe. “Fishermen have packed in their lines and left for other places, the remaining ones are a few locals trying their luck mainly because they have nowhere else to go,” Mohammed Juma a resident of Mwanga district revealed last week. Before the fish population declined, fishermen and the surrounding communities earned a living by supplying fish to neighboring villages, Moshi town and when the season was good, fish from Jipe would be exported to Kenya, Uganda and as far as Malawi and Zambia down south. A recent visit to the lake revealed massive growth of hyacinths adding up to varieties of other water plants that of late have been consuming up the water body at an alarming rate. Water chocking growth is the major problem taking toll on a number of lakes and other still water bodies in the Northern zone at the moment. Most fishermen have turned into farming, it was the only way out when Lake Jipe started to ebb away a few years back,” Wifred Mangale a local farm technician stated, adding that at the moment the lake is slowly but surely becoming a pond. Even during its better days Lake Jipe has always been small, measuring just 30 square kilometers. The water body straddles the northern borderline between Kenya and Tanzania. Jipe is home to many water birds, including the Lesser Jacana and Purple Gallinule that are quite rare in Africa. The basin also hosts the Madagascar Squacco Herron, Black Herron, African Darter and African Skimmer. Sandwiched between the Pare Mountains range and the massive Kilimanjaro, Lake Jipe is also an eco-system to variety of other wildlife like the Hippopotamus, Otters, crocodiles, waterbucks and elephants. The northern half of the lake lies on the Kenyan side within the Tsavo West National Park famed for its huge elephant population Recent climatic changes coupled with human activities such as irrigation, deforestation and diversion in the area leading to increased silt at the feeder river mouth, the inflow has been drastically reduced leading to a multiplied effect on both the ecology of the ecosystem and the socio-economy of the area. The process to develop The Lake Jipe Management Plan started in the early 1990s when regional development authorities of both Kenya and Tanzania began to dialogue on how to stop the rapid deterioration of the basin’s ecosystem. The dialogue led to a meeting of stakeholders from both countries with the support of the International Union for Conservation of Nature in 1999 in Taveta. It was concluded that an integrated plan for the lake basin ecosystem was needed to guide Jipe’s restoration. A dialogue process initiated by Kenya’s Coast Development Authority and Tanzania’s Pangani Basin Water Office in the early 1990s was concluded with the inauguration of the Lake Jipe, Lake Challa and Umba River Ecosystem Integrated Water Management Plan in June 2006. The Pangani River Basin provides water for hydropower plants at the ‘Nyumba ya Mungu’ dam where the generation of electricity which accounts for at least 20 per cent of the country’s power output takes place. Preliminary research findings on the survival of Lake Jipe were to the effect that the lake would totally disappear in less than 10 years from now. Lake Jipe is fed mainly by rivers originating from the high ends of Mt. Kilimanjaro at altitudes of 5895 meters above sea level. The Kilimanjaro experiences surface runoff from its eastern slopes which then feeds into the Lumi River and flows to Lake Jipe.
It is a cross-country affair as the slopes of Mt.
Kilimanjaro are all in Tanzania while the Lumi River runs through the
Kenyan territory, through Taveta before it enters the lake. River Lumi
enters Lake Jipe through a large Typha swamp, measuring some 20 square
kilometers.
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