Stranded dreams on lush green rivers
Water hyacinths through the colonisation of Nigeria’s waterways is shrinking rivers, threatening the local economy of coastal communities and forcing many to migrate to densely populated cities, creating slums besides skyscrapers, writes ISAAC ANYAOGU.
Everyone who has been to the tributary at Kara market under the Berger Bridge along Lagos-Ibadan expressway, which flows into the Ogun River, before June 19 this year, expressed deep shock when on that day the river literally disappeared.
In its brown waters, rams and cattle for which the market is famed satisfied their taste. Women, clad in clothes blackened by sooth and smoke, who processed cow skin for sale in makeshift furnaces, children who hawked sachet water and grown men who slept in the stalls at night after cutting up meat parts in the day, had use for the water.
On June 19 the river turned into a lush bed of vegetation as water hyacinths took over!
“I don’t know what to say about this, I’m confused, I just woke up and the water is gone,” said Usman, one of the cattle traders who travels up north every forth night and returned with a truckload of cattle. His gaunt eyes darting about, almost unhinged, like a frog dropped in a desert.
But it was always going to happen. For a year, the river seemed to be shrinking as weeds close in, a hostile takeover of the waters.
A threat subtle yet insidious
Admittedly, for many coastal communities in Nigeria, invasion by water hyacinth have not always been this dramatic.
Like in Ilaje, a riverine community in Ondo state with an area of 1,318 km² where about 300,000 people call its beaches and swampy terrains along the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, home. Found in the region are the Ilajes, a distinct migratory group of Yoruba people spread along the coastal belts of Ondo, Ogun, Lagos and Delta states.
While the Ilajes are migratory by nature, some movements are forced. Setunde Ibrahim, a 29 year old, former boat operator, who now works as a commercial motor cycle operator in Apapa, Lagos, still rues the damage to his boat by water hyacinth, three years after it put him out of business and forced him to move to Lagos.
“I nor fit understand how e take happen, my brother,” he said in Pidgin English. “I just hear (a screeching sound) and I stop the boat – no the boat just stop,” he corrected himself.
“Ah!” his voice went a note higher, as if the drama was required to convey the gravity of his plight.
Perhaps it did. His face resigned, defeated, he let out a sigh drawn from as deep as the deepest nadir of his soul.
“My heart dey do wham! wham! as I see wetin happen, those ‘watar hayacent’ again, i see say my propeller don enter inside the dirty wey don gather and the mechanic say that na N10,000 ($33) e go collect, I just pay N7,000 ($23) to do am the week wey pass, na him i tire.”
Ten thousand naira may not seem much until you learn his monthly income is only N55,000 ($180) from which he supports a wife, three children and an aged parent.
Ibrahim relocated from Ilaje to Lagos where he sleeps with a friend in an empty house in Apapa that belonged to a relative who fled the horrors of petrol tankers in Apapa to Lekki. Three young men from the community accompanied him. They are all commercial operators. In Ilaje, there are now mostly people whose best years were long past.
Like Ibrahim, thousands from coastal communities migrate to Lagos, a city of over 20 million people. Akinwunmi Ambode, the governor of the state, last year said over 2,000 immigrants come into Lagos everyday many without any plans to leave.
Lagos is now bursting by the seams. Impatient drivers blare car horns at the slightest provocation because there are more cars than roads, ear-piecing generating sets wail like the pelting march of angry thunders as power supply is epileptic, a heaving mass of people are let loose in markets bus stops such that the environment is choking, haunting.
Nigeria has an estimated vehicle population of 11,458,370 as at the first quarter of 2017, according to a Road Transport data by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), a government funded statistics agency, of which over 25 percent are in Lagos. This is often why sitting through traffic gridlocks on Lagos roads is like taking a front row seat to watch your worst nightmare.
“With 21 million people, Lagos is choking from its own escalating pollution, poisonous air that drags down its citizens and commerce while health care costs balloon. Traffic is increasing, emissions are not regulated and fuel tankers often catch fire on the streets,” said the World Bank.
Last year, a World Health Organization (WHO) data indicated that four of the worst cities in the world for air pollution are in Nigeria. “The contributing factors to pollution are a reliance on using solid fuels for cooking, burning waste and traffic pollution from very old cars,” Maria Neira, WHO Director, Department of Public Health, Environmental and Social Determinants of Health, told CNN.
The pressure on cities like Kaduna, Lagos, Aba and Onitsha are largely due to rural-urban migration. Many rely on diesel generators that emit noxious fumes due to poor power supply. Cars that should be sitting the rest of their days in a museum release emissions, unchecked.
Many of the young people who remain in these coastal communities transport market women and goods to towns but contend with water hyacinth in a battle they are losing royally.
However few connect the dots between climate change impacts and the shrinking rivers occasioned by weed invasion.
“The invasive behaviour of a weed depends on the weed’s genetic variability, biotic factors, and climatic factors with which it interacts. The climatic factors that affect the invasive traits of weeds include the atmospheric temperature, soil temperature, precipitation, evaporation, and CO2 concentration.
“The biological traits that are influenced by a change in any one or more of these climatic factors include the pattern of assimilate partitioning, induction of dormancy or seed germination, herbivore tolerance, propagule production and distribution, variability of plant architecture, photosynthetic rate, and seed bank longevity,” concluded researchers Ramanathan Kathiresan and Gbehounou Gualbert in a study on the impact of climate change on the invasive traits of weeds published in 2016.
In the year 2001, the National Institute for Freshwater Fisheries Research of Nigeria conducted a national survey and found that over 30 States out of 36 states and Federal Capital Territory of Nigeria had been infested by water hyacinth.
Residents say the infestation reaches epic proportions between March and July when the rains come. They also contend with other weeds and dirt including plastics and soda cans and all sorts of odds and ends to make a living.
“Usually we do not operate in the night because the risks are more,” said Hakeem Salau, a boat operator in Ipakodo community in Ikorodu, a Lagos suburb where boat mishaps have occurred too frequently, many attributed to boat propellers caught in water hyacinths. “We have to adjust our time backward, as soon as the sun is beginning to leave the sky, you better follow it home.”
Sojourn into Nigerian waters
Water hyacinth (Eichhornia crassippes), was introduced into tropical countries as an ornamental plant and they were subsequently converted into weed in response to the high level of nutrient in the urban, industrial and municipal wastewater, according to researchers.
Water Hyacinths which was carried by water current into Nigerian waters, drifted from the neighbouring Republic of Benin. The weed precisely came from Port-Novo creek, which has an entry in the sea around the Lagos Lagoon.
Before 1984, it was alien to the Nigerian aquatic systems but now disrupts the ecology, sociological, cultural and economic realities of the indigenous communities especially the artisanal fisher folks within the area, says a 2007 study by N. Uka, K.S. Chukwuka and F. Daddy on water hyacinth infestation in Nigeria published in the Journal of Plant Sciences.
There are about 76 species of aquatic plants considered as weeds but water hyacinth is of particular interest, because of its high rate of invasion and colonisation, impact on water transportation and recurrent ecological disasters that often times lead to ocean surges in some of the riverine communities, rendering many homeless and displaced.
Respite remains elusive
Online resource Wikipedia highlights three controls: chemical, physical and biological control.
Physical control is performed by land based machines such as bucket cranes, draglines, or by water based machinery such as aquatic weed harvester, dredges, or vegetation shredders. Mechanical removal is seen as the best short-term solution to the proliferation of the plant. It is however costly and requires the use of both land and water vehicles.
Biological control agents (weevils) are used to deal with water hyacinth in over 20 countries.
Herbicides are used especially for small infestations but concerns about environment and health related effects where people collect water for drinking and washing and where fishes are caught remain.
However, a study on the effect of herbicidal control of water hyacinth on Fish Health at the Ere Channel, Ogun State, Nigeria by G.N Ezeri published in the journal of applied sciences & environmental management, in 2002 highlighted one such experiment where chemical control was successful.
In the 1990s, at Ere, a fishing village on the outlets of Yewa River to the Lagoon waters of Badagry Creek, a herbicidal control of water hyacinth, was carried out by applying glyphosate (N – phosphyonomethyI glycerine) containing 360g/l glyphosate in the form of 480g/l isopropylamine salt at the rate of 2.16kg active ingredient (a.i/ha) by a fixed wing, AG-CAT Schweizer plane at the Ere fishing channel.
Pathological studies revealed that of the total number of fishes examined prior to the chemical application, 334 (5%) had fin-rot, 2541 (38%) abrasion, 802 (12%) lesions, 334 (5%) ulcerations, 1805 (27%) sloughing of their body slimc. None had tumours or nodules. The post application examination of fishes revealed that 5806 (7%) had fin-rot, 8294 (10%) abrasion, 4147 (5%) lesions, 1244 (1.5%) ulcerations and 4145 (5%) sloughing of body slime. None had tumours or nodules.
The total number of fish that showed signs of infection prior to herbicidal application was 516 (86.9%) while it was 23,636 (28.49%) for post application of herbicide. The total number of fish caught prior to herbicidal treatment was 6,686 (7.46%) while a total number of 82,943 fish (92.54%) were caught after treatment. No fish mortality was observed throughout the post treatment monitoring. In this multi-disciplinary work, it was established that glyphosate at 2.16 a. i / ha controlled WH and associated weeds within four weeks of application without any intrinsic deleterious effect on fish and aquatic fauna.
Twenty years ago, a World Bank survey estimated the loss due to water hyacinth in Nigeria to be around $500 million annually and therefore advised direct intervention as a measure to abate the menace of the weed. Its advance to about 30 states in Nigeria suggests the loss would be much higher.
Experts say water hyacinth is endangers aquatic environment biologically, physically blocks the waterways restricting transportation and human activities. Their masses when adrift dislodge fishing nets in water resulting in huge financial losses to artisanal fisher-folk. Water hyacinths also provide hiding for snakes and other dangerous aquatic organisms.
Efforts to rid the Nigeria’s waters of these weeds have mostly been reactive. Usually after boat accidents or when transport routes have become impassable are efforts the rid the affected section of the water with weeds.
The Ogun State Government is working on clearing water hyacinths around Kara market. Dredgers, excavators and workers, have been mobilised to the site.
Bolaji Oyeleye, the states commissioner for environment said, “Water hyacinth is not new; it simply means the water body is low at this point in time. People are not supposed to walk on the place. It allows dangerous animals to inhabit the place. River Ogun is important to us. It drains into the Lagoon. We can’t have this for a long time because it is going to affect a lot of things.”
The government has since shut down Kara market and has relocated the traders to a 300-hectare piece of land in Ogere in the Ikenne local government area of the state. Many now pay water vendors to supply them water.