A team of Kenyan lawyers has dragged Uganda to court over the unprecedented rise in the water levels of Lake Victoria which has caused floods in the Nyanza region.
The team led by former Law Society of Kenya (LSK) President, Isaac Oker o, filed the petition at the East Africa Court of Justice against Uganda.
This is after it emerged that an attempt by Uganda to meet the demand for electricity could be behind the floods that have rendered thousands of Kenyans homeless in the lake region.
The East Africa Community Council of Ministers suggest Uganda may have breached the agreements on how much water to release from Nalubale Dam.
The dam is the main outlet of the water from the world’s largest freshwater lake with the reservoir being one of the two major outlets.
“We want the court to examine whether, as we suspect, there has been a violation of provisions of the treaty that establishes EAC,” noted Okero in Interview on Kenyan Television KTN News.
The former LSK president noted that a treaty signed between members of the East African Community has an obligation on all the partner states to protect and manage the resources of the community which includes natural resources.
“15 years ago there was a substantial drop in water levels of Lake Victoria which was blamed on drought What the lawyers discovered was there was a deviation of the agreed curve by the government of Uganda in pursuing the policy for Hydropower Generation which was captured by consultants of World Bank who were funding the project.
“Late March we began to see substantial floods in our properties, a day or two later, Uganda was announcing it was going to release more water into the Nile in order to bring down the levels of the lake,” explained Okero.
According to Okero, Uganda’s ambitious hydroelectricity project was directly responsible for the flooding in the region.
“The meteorologist has been predicting substantial record-breaking rainfall which has come and of course when the rainfall comes it meets water that is abnormally high and this is when we see backflow of rivers into the lake,” concluded the lawyer.
Uganda insists that the policy, which determines volumes of water to be released based on Lake Victoria levels, cannot be implemented as it does not take into consideration several factors, like extraction in the affected countries.
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