Lost history · 1969-1983; killings 28 April 1980
No matching image yet, so this page uses a plain title card instead of a photo.
The dam was meant to make farmers richer. Instead it took their land, and when they protested, police opened fire. Today it is taught as a textbook case of how development goes wrong.
Before the dam, the Sokoto River floodplain was not empty land waiting for someone to improve it. About 50,000 farmers worked it. They used the river's own rhythm. When the water rose in the wet season, they grew rice and sorghum. When it fell back, they planted onions, garlic and tomatoes in the damp soil it left behind. Many used a shadoof, a simple lifting pole with a bucket, to raise water into small channels and ponds.
Much of that land was held by communities, with no written record of who owned what. Women in seclusion did not usually work the fields, but they had ownership rights and helped with processing. Women who were not secluded farmed actively.
These were people living close to the edge, in a region where rain was never reliable, swinging between 500 and 1,300 millimetres a year. That was one honest reason to want a dam: steady water in a dry place. Farmers who live that close to the line care more about avoiding disaster than about making big profits.
In 1969 the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization recommended exactly the sort of careful project that might have helped them: a small dam and irrigation scheme at Talata Mafara, plus dams upstream to control flooding. The FAO stressed going slowly and disturbing existing farming as little as possible, partly because nobody in the region had much experience with irrigation.
That advice did not survive. In 1971 the military government asked for proposals. In 1972 the job went to Impressit Bakolori Nigeria, a company 60 percent owned by the Nigerian government and 40 percent by a subsidiary of Fiat. During the study years that followed, the plan grew into one huge dam and a large, mechanised irrigation scheme. Local farmers were never consulted. Nobody studied what would happen downstream.
Work started in 1974 and the dam was finished in 1978. It is an earth embankment 5.5 kilometres long, with a concrete section 48 metres high. The reservoir took three years to fill and spread over 8,000 hectares, backing up 19 kilometres. The pipes and canals were not done until 1983, and they covered 23,000 hectares instead of the 30,000 planned. After the cost overruns it became one of the most expensive irrigation projects per hectare anywhere in the world.
For the people living there, construction meant losing everything. Land levelling, clearing and canal digging destroyed good farmland and trees. Farmers who had fed their families became landless. Most got no compensation, or were handed worthless land. Those who stayed were pushed to grow crops they did not know, such as wheat. For years they had no way to earn a living.
The farmers protested. In November 1979 the governor of what was then Sokoto State, Shehu Kangiwa, faced the demonstrators and promised to deal with all their complaints. Five months later, on 28 April 1980, police moved in on unarmed protesters and killed more than 380 people, according to the accounts cited. The government said only 25 had died, and played the whole thing down.
The damage did not stop at the dam. Downstream, farmers needed a big release of water before the growing season, then less later, because they farmed the floodwater as it went down. The dam's operators did not pay attention to that. They released too little, at the wrong times. Floods downstream became shallower, shorter and smaller. Of 19,000 hectares of floodplain, about 7,000 hectares of rice and 5,000 hectares of dry-season crops were lost. Some of that was made up with lower-value millet and sorghum, but 12,000 people had to move. The lost farm output was valued at about 7 million US dollars a year. And the big sheet of water in the heat lost a lot to evaporation.
The irrigated land did not do well either. A higher water table plus fierce evaporation pulled salt to the surface, and salinisation ruined half of the irrigable land. Waterborne diseases rose. By 2003 the sprinklers no longer worked, and only 7,500 hectares were being farmed, mostly rice, using gravity-fed water. Fields were left untilled. Many people drifted off to the cities. Overall the usable cropped area fell by 53 percent.
Even the lake behind the dam let people down. Its shallow edges are small, so fish have few places to breed, and the water is cloudy with soil, which blocks the light that underwater plants need. The reservoir ended up producing fewer fish than the river and its natural pools once did.
A UNESCO report in 1988 put it dryly: a fuller economic study would have made the scheme look less attractive than the sums used to approve it. Bakolori is now held up as a classic example of development failure. For the families on the Sokoto River, it was never a lesson. It was their land, and their dead.
