Angola, Botswana and Namibia agreed to sign what has come to be known as the “OKACOM Agreement” in 1994, in Windhoek, Namibia. The Agreement committed member states to promote coordinated and environmentally sustainable regional water resources development, while addressing the legitimate social and economic needs of each of the riparian states.
Recently, Member of Parliament for Nkange, Edwin Batshu, pleaded with government to help communities whose livelihoods depend on fishing in the Okavango River.
According to him, the communities in the area bitterly complain that they are not deriving maximum benefit from the Okavango River while their Namibian counterparts do. The communities according to Batshu are crying out loud that while they are unable to fish during off season periods, their counterparts in Namibia freely go into fishing expeditions in the same river during off season period.
What Batshu basically raised, was that the social and economic needs of the people who depend on the river for survival. He was drawing our attention to double standards we all thought had come to an end when the countries signed OKACOM.
Batshu’s legitimate concerns raise the question whether or not the OKACOM has fully served its intended purpose. To date, how has it reacted to challenges such as this one?
The role of OKACOM is to anticipate and reduce those unintended, unacceptable and often unnecessary impacts that occur due to uncoordinated resources development.
We fear that despite OKACOM the same might actually be happening. Otherwise why Batshu’s mature complaints?
We agree with Batshu that the minister responsible should engage his counterpart in Namibia to find a solution to the problem.
By signing the agreement, the three countries appreciated the implications that developments upstream of the river can have on the resource downstream. Experts say most of the river is currently undeveloped and is recognized as one of the few “near pristine” rivers in the world.
The Okavango River, everybody knows, plays an important role not only in the lives of local populations residing along the river in Namibia and Botswana – two of the driest countries in southern Africa so it cannot be morally right to have communities living side by side with such a natural endowment deriving crumbs from it while resorts owners whose bookings are done in South Africa rake in dollars in tourism money.
With water-based tourism being the second largest foreign currency earner for Botswana and also that most tourism activities are centred on the delta system, which forms part of the larger Okavango River system, there should be no reason that poor communities who eke a living from the river should be ever marginalized. They should be empowered. We want to have fish eateries along the river owned by Batswana.
The Okavango Delta has rich biological diversity and is internationally recognized as a site of ecological importance. It has, as a result, been declared a wetland of international importance.
The OKACOM Agreement established the Permanent Okavango River Basin Water Commission whose objective is to act as technical advisor to the governments of the three states on matters relating to the conservation, development and utilisation of the resources of common interest to the basin member states.
We want to believe that the time is now for the three countries to take stock of the Commission. There has to be political will to implement the agreement.
