Ugandan Dams Pulling Plug on Lake Victoria – Report
Date: 09-Feb-06
Country: UK
It accused Uganda of flouting an international agreement to protect water levels in the freshwater lake. About 30 million people depend on it for their livelihoods.
With lake levels now at an 80-year low, U.N expert Daniel Kull blamed two dams run by the Ugandan Electricity Generation Company as much as the current drought for the shortfall.
Kull, a Nairobi-based hydrologist with the UN's International Strategy for Disaster, calculated that if the dams had been operated at internationally agreed flow levels, the drought would have caused only half the loss.
"Today's lake levels would be around 45 centimetres higher," he writes in a report by the International Rivers Network lobby group that was cited on Wednesday by New Scientist magazine.
To back his conclusion, he estimated that releases from the Ugandan dams were nearly twice the permitted rates in both March and November 2005.
Frank Muramuzi of Uganda's National Association of Professional Environmentalists, agreed: "This dam complex is pulling the plug on Lake Victoria," he said.
