Ugandans accused of `pulling the plug' on Lake Victoria

Engineers in Uganda are secretly draining Lake Victoria to generate electricity, flouting an international agreement to protect the world's second-largest freshwater lake, according to a new report.

Daniel Kull, a hydrologist with the UN's International Strategy for Disaster Reduction in Nairobi, Kenya, said the country is directing more of the lake's waters than agreed 50 years ago under an international pact.

He has calculated that the water level in the lake is almost half a meter lower than it should be.

Official reports on the hydroelectric dam operations published for last March and November show that water releases were almost twice their permitted rates, he said.

The report is published by a US environmental lobby group, International Rivers Network.

Frank Muramuzi, of Uganda's National Association of Professional Environmentalists, told New Scientist magazine: "This dam complex is pulling the plug on Lake Victoria."

The lake, which covers an area that includes Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania, supports 30 million people. Water levels have plummeted since 2003 and are now at an 80-year low.

Some 3 percent of the lake's volume has disappeared, leaving towns running low on water and international ferries stranded far from their jetties.

There have also been disruptions to electricity supply. The company that operates the dams, the Uganda Electricity Generating Company, has blamed this on a 10 percent to 15 percent decline in rainfall across the lake's catchment area during the past two years.

But Kull said that the dams are as much to blame as the drought. If the dams had operated as agreed, he says, the drought would have accounted for only half the water loss.

The problems date back to the completion of a second hydropower complex in 2002.