This little island doesn’t look like much.
It’s a slab of rock, about half a hectacre large, packed with rusty metal shacks, heaps of garbage, glassy-eyed fishermen and squads of prostitutes — essentially a microslum bathing in the middle of Africa’s greatest lake.
But baby Migingo is creating a huge fuss.
The island happens to lie right along the disputed watery border between Kenya and Uganda, and politicians have even threatened to go to war over it.
The reason?
Fish. Lots of them, but maybe not enough. The island is an angler’s paradise, surrounded by schools of tasty — and exportable — Nile perch. But Lake Victoria, one of the world’s biggest bodies of fresh water, which 30 million impoverished Africans depend on for their survival, may be running out of these fish. According to a recent study, Nile perch stocks are down by nearly 70 percent, threatening a crucial industry worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
But there may be an even bigger issue here — the rapidly receding lake itself.
Water levels have dropped more than 90cm in the last 10 years and explosive algae blooms, which cover the lake’s surface like a coat of thick green paint, are choking off the fish.
It is irrefutable evidence, environmentalists say, of climate change, overpopulation, pollution, deforestation and other modern ills coming to a head in a part of Africa that is unprepared to deal with it.
“You’ve got an ecosystem that is totally out of balance now,” said Nick Nuttall, a spokesman for the UN Environment Program, which has been closely watching Lake Victoria. “It should be an extreme concern for anybody who cares about the future of 30 million people. The pressures on this huge natural asset in East Africa are increasing.”
And so are the passions about Migingo. At a recent rugby match between Kenya and Uganda, Kenyan fans chanted: “Migingo, united, can never be defeated.”
In April, Kenyan hooligans got so worked up about the islet that they ripped up the railway line to Uganda. Fishermen on Migingo said that the Ugandan police officers prowling around the island have been dishing out beatings lately — and worse, stealing their catch.
A bilateral border commission is poring over dusty colonial documents, trying to figure out if Migingo is in Kenya or Uganda, but the group itself has been beset by cash woes and rival patriotic feelings.
The dispute heated up this year when Uganda sent soldiers to claim the island. To Kenya’s ire, the Ugandans even planted a flag. Before the lake levels dropped a few years ago, Migingo was little more than a rock sticking out of the water and nobody gave a hoot. Today, it is still just a hazy bump on the horizon when gazing from shore, though more than 300 people live there, mostly Kenyan fishermen.
But the Ugandan government claims that Migingo is in Ugandan waters and that it is illegal for Kenyans to fish there. The subtext is that fish are essential to Uganda’s economy, which does not have the manufacturing or tourism industries that Kenya has. Uganda’s 200 shilling coin (worth about US$0.10) has the national seal on one side and a scaly fish on the other. Each year, Uganda earns more than US$100 million exporting Nile perch, though overfishing and environmental mismanagement are imperiling that.
Most of Uganda’s fish processing factories — the ones that are not shuttered — are down to 25 percent capacity because of the lack of fish, the Ugandan Fish Processors and Exporters Association said.
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