Floods in Mozambique: “Political strategy” needed – Deutsche Welle

Login

Register

http://www.clubofmozambique.com/

Floods in Mozambique: “Political strategy” needed – Deutsche Welle

1:48 CAT | 10 Feb 2017

DW / Bridge over the Limpopo River in Guijá

Floods along the Limpopo River in Gaza have forced 1,170 people to evacuate their homes for safer areas. Analyst says the solution to the recurring flooding problems involves the construction of dams.

In the province of Gaza, southern Mozambique, the Limpopo River has overflowed. A surge of 4,000 cubic meters per second has reached the districts of Chokwé, Chibuto, Chicualacuala, Guijá and Mabalane since last week. As a result, roads were cut and fields were flooded.

The rise in the level of the Limpopo waters is destroying the means of survival of many of the 224,000 people affected by the famine in Gaza following severe drought in the last two years.

Early warnings

Many people living in high-risk areas in the village of Chiduachine were forced to leave their homes by the Limpopo River overflow.

Überschwemmungen in Mosambik 2013 (AFP/Getty Images/T. Cumbana) — In January 2013, floods in southern Mozambique left 70,000 displaced people

José Ussivane says that this year, the population was warned in time. “We ended up living in these risk zones, because this is where we practice agriculture and raise our animals. This year at least we were informed of this surge in time and managed to get out with our assets,” he says.

Ussivane, 43, also has a request for the authorities: “We want the government to create conditions for us to have cleaner water because the wells have been flooded.”

According to Manuel Machaieie, from the National Institute for Disaster Management in Gaza, no families have had to be moved to accommodation centers so far, but warns that the population must remain vigilant.

Floods like to recur

Mosambik Überschwemmungen in Limpopo (DW/C. Matsinhe) — National Institute for Disaster Management in Gaza

“We continue to appeal to people living in at-risk areas to leave, because we are still in the middle of the second period of the rainy season. That means that we can easily experienced similar situations to those we had just now,” Machaieie says.

He reiterates that the population must continue to “settle in the safe areas or in the homes of family members”, taking “what they have so that they can use it wherever they are”.

Dams as a solution

For Carlos Mhula, a social analyst in Gaza, the cyclical problems of floods and drought are due to the “lack of strategy” suitable for an arable area such as the Limpopo valley on the part of policy makers.

Mhula says the solution involves constructing dams along the rivers that traverse the southern province of Mozambique.

“With dams, we would have water for the animals, and for people to grow things. There is a lack of strategy, of imagination,” he says.

Mhula also gives South Africa and Zimbabwe as example of countries that “live on dams” “We can not escape it,” he says.

According to the analyst, the proposed dam in the Limpopo Basin in the Mapai district is welcome, but even so may not be the solution to climate change phenomena such as severe droughts alternating with above-normal rainfall.

The Massingir dam in Gaza province is one example. It had no water for agricultural irrigation for more than two years. The effects would not be so drastic, according Mhula, if there were a succession of small dams along the river.

Source: Deutsche Welle