Stopped at the Kgotla
In the 1980s Botswana's water department proposed dredging the Okavango's outflow river and regulating the delta's floods. The scheme was stopped at a public meeting in Maun on 11 January 1991, and it has never been formally cancelled — only suspended.
Almost nothing leaves the Okavango. Somewhere between seven and fifteen billion cubic metres of water come down out of the Angolan highlands each year and spread across a fan of channels and floodplains about the size of a small country, and something like ninety-six to ninety-eight per cent of it goes straight back into the air as evaporation and transpiration. What is left runs out at the bottom end, down the Thamalakane and the Boteti, and dies in the salt pans at Makgadikgadi. That two per cent is why Maun is where it is. It is also what Botswana's Department of Water Affairs proposed, in the early 1980s, to take charge of.
The Southern Okavango Integrated Water Development Project would have dredged the lower Boro River — some forty kilometres of it — and put bunds and storage on the channels around it, converting a ragged seasonal outflow into a managed supply. It was an ordinary piece of engineering by the standards of the decade and it was competently argued. It was stopped by a public meeting in Maun on 11 January 1991, and it has never been formally cancelled.
What was actually on the table
The stated customers were Maun, the villages strung along the Boteti, and irrigated agriculture. The contested customer was Orapa, the diamond mine out on the edge of the pans, which needs water in quantities no village does. De Beers denied that the scheme was for Orapa. A great many people in Ngamiland did not believe the denial, and in a sense it did not matter whether they were right: the mine was the only entity in the region large enough to justify that much regulated supply, and everybody at the meeting could do that arithmetic. There was also a precedent nobody had to imagine. The lower Boro had already been dredged once, in the 1970s, and hydrologists were still publishing papers two decades later on what it had done to the channels either side of it.
The meeting on 11 January 1991
A kgotla is not a public consultation in the sense that a European planning authority would recognise. It is the Tswana assembly ground, the forum in which a chief hears his people, and the convention that anybody standing in it may speak is not a courtesy — it is the point of the institution. On 11 January 1991 residents of Ngamiland came into the Maun kgotla alongside cattle owners, fishermen, guides and the researchers who had started working in the delta, and the objection was close to unanimous. Bunding the outflow, they argued, would impoverish the floodplain ecology, thin the fish, and take away plant resources that a lot of households in that district actually live on. The consultants ran the meeting, listened, and reported back that the project had no support among the people whose floodplain it was.
The consultation was designed to explain the project to Ngamiland. Ngamiland used it to explain Ngamiland to the project, and the project did not survive the exchange.
The review the government commissioned against its own scheme
What the government did next is the part worth noticing. Rather than defend its department, it asked the IUCN to review the project independently — a state inviting an outside body to audit a plan its own civil servants had spent years preparing. The review reported in 1992. It found the case for the works overstated, said the alternatives had not been seriously examined, and recommended treating the Okavango as a pilot region for decentralised, multi-sector planning with district government, non-governmental organisations and the private sector inside the process rather than downstream of it. The government suspended construction indefinitely that year. The IUCN had asked for abandonment; what it got was suspension, and the distinction has been noted by every hydrologist who has written about the delta since.
What was built instead
The argument had exposed something embarrassing: nobody could answer the basic questions. How much water actually arrives, where it goes, what a bund would do downstream of itself — none of it was known to the standard the decision required. So in 1994 the University of Botswana set up a research centre in Maun, originally carrying the name of the family that had run De Beers and now called the Okavango Research Institute, specifically because of this project. In September of the same year Botswana, Angola and Namibia signed the agreement in Windhoek establishing OKACOM, the basin commission. The delta was listed under the Ramsar Convention in 1996, at over fifty-five thousand square kilometres one of the largest wetlands entered on that register anywhere. UNESCO inscribed it on 22 June 2014 as the thousandth World Heritage site. The order matters: the designations came after the fight and were built by the side that won it, not the other way round.
The ninety per cent that falls somewhere else
Botswana has the delta and almost none of the rain. The catchment is Angolan; Namibia holds the middle reach. In 1996, after two failed rainy seasons, Namibia proposed abstracting around seventeen million cubic metres a year from the river at Rundu and piping it 260 kilometres to Grootfontein and the head of the Eastern National Water Carrier. A study in six volumes appeared in August 1997. Good rains that same year removed the urgency, the pipeline was not built, and Botswana's objection went through OKACOM, which is precisely what OKACOM is for. Angola's own share of the basin sat effectively frozen through twenty-seven years of civil war that ended in 2002, and the Cubango and Cuito headwaters are now being surveyed by a country with every right to develop them.
That is the limit of the 1991 precedent, and it is worth being clear about it rather than sentimental. A kgotla in Maun can stop a Botswana government department, and did. It cannot sit in Menongue or in Rundu. Nor has it closed the domestic file: Maun has grown, its water demand has grown with it, and the scheme on the shelf is still described in the record as suspended. The delta's protection has always rested on the same thing it rested on in January 1991, which is that the people who live on the floodplain turn up and say so.