Omnipresent, sickening, the smell of rotten fish hangs over the town of Kisumu, in eastern Kenya. Between October and November, more than 360 million tilapia died in Lake Victoria. An ecological disaster caused by a known phenomenon: theupwelling, the deep waters, polluted and lacking in oxygen, suddenly rose to the surface, asphyxiating hundreds of millions of fish, parked in floating breeding cages. total cost of losses: approximately 10 million euros.
“The lake speaks to us, it tries to tell us something, warns Boniface Nyakach, an activist who heads the Kisumu Peace and Justice Center. The water is green, it smells, and now the fish are dying. It’s a call for help. » According to him, and other activists who have long warned of his “death to come”Lake Victoria is dying of overexploitation.
The second largest body of fresh water in the world, and the largest in Africa, it shares its shores between Kenya (6%), Uganda (43%) and Tanzania (51%), where more than 40 million people depend on him daily. And owes its economic miracle to the introduction of Nile perch into its waters by British settlers in the 1950s.
Water hyacinth, “our worst enemy”
The development of the species first caused a commercial boom and then a slow loss of the ecosystem, as the documentary crudely showed. Darwin’s Nightmare. Because if it made it possible to break fishing records at first, the Nile perch has since decimated hundreds of endemic species (more than 500 cichlids). Catches have halved over the past thirty years. Above all, the great rush towards the lake leading to urbanization, deforestation and pollution, has destroyed a unique biodiversity.
Polluted waters, a mixture of industrial product waste, pesticides and large-scale fertilizers, poison the fish. Just like the recent appearance of water hyacinth, an invasive plant from Latin America. “Our worst enemy”, said the fisherman Godfrey Agong of her. It thrives in a polluted environment and deprives the lake of oxygen, suffocating fish in the process and cutting off access to fishing grounds for Godfrey and local fishermen. The invasion, since controlled, penalized their activity for years. The water hyacinths are now transformed into biogas by a local company.
Kenya consumes 500,000 tonnes of fish per year but only produces around 150,000 tonnes. The fishing crisis prompted the authorities to take an absurd decision: import Chinese fish to meet demand on the shores of Lake Victoria. Since 2015, tilapias caught in the China Sea have been arriving daily in Kisumu after a 9,000 km journey, by container ship, then by road.
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