People along the Matan Fada in northwest Nigeria remember the river’s abundance as being typified by fish literally falling from the trees, but those days are gone.
The waterway, which was home to a UNESCO-listed fishing festival, is disappearing, locals say, as rainfall plunges and temperatures rise as part of the impact of climate change.
Husaini Makwashi, 42, a fishing community leader in the riverside town of Argungu, said he had not seen migratory birds such as pelicans and a water duck species, locally called dumulmulu, in a while.
“When a certain bird (species) arrived, it meant that the rainy season was approaching and people would start repairing their roofs and preparing their fields,” he said.
Sat on the edge of the Sahel, a semi-arid belt stretching along the Sahara desert’s southern rim, Argungu in Kebbi State is vulnerable to climate change, experts say.
The town has seen the “desert approaching very fast”, said Nigerian Conservation Foundation director Joseph Daniel Onoja.
For decades, Argungu held an international fishing festival, which included competitions in hand fishing and wild duck catching.
Legends abound about life on the river — crocodiles don’t come out of the water on Fridays, and 50 years ago, all you had to do was bend down and pick up fish from the river.
But rising temperatures and excessive evaporation are contributing “to the shrinking of water bodies”, said Talatu Tende, an ecologist at Aplori, an ornithological research centre in Jos city.
Rainfall patterns have “changed greatly”, she said, with rains coming later and falling for short periods and “in small litres compared to previous years.”
“In the case of the migratory birds because water bodies are shrinking and their food resources (fish, worms) are no longer available, the numbers that congregate will either reduce or they will completely stop coming to such an area,” she said.
As a child, Safiya Magagi, 61, said she liked to wake up early in the morning when migratory birds were nesting in the region.
“Birds used to take fish back to their nests to feed their chicks,” she said.
“There were so many that they would fall from the trees and all we had to do was reach out and pick them,” she added.
Changing landscape
Kebbi State is seeing its landscape gradually transformed by climate change and human activity, including tree cutting for firewood in a state with one of the highest fertility rates in the country.
The savannah region has lost its date and shea trees. The immense kapok trees and their cotton-filled fruits, used to make mattresses, have been cut down and never replanted. Neem and mango trees and a few baobabs remain.
Marshes and waterholes have dried up or been drained by farmers to grow crops.
Climate activists have long pointed out that Africa pays one of the highest prices for climate change, while the continent is responsible for just a fraction of global greenhouse gas emissions.
In west Africa, average temperatures have risen by between 1 and 3C since the mid-1970s, with the biggest increases recorded in the Sahara and Sahel.
With a temperature rise of 2C, more than a third of freshwater fish species are projected to be vulnerable to extinction by 2100, rising to 56.4 percent with a 4C rise in temperature, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said.
The Emir of Argungu, Alhaji Samaila Muhammad Mera, said he was worried by the disappearance of lakes and the loss of “farmlands due to desertification”.
To conserve the fish, he has imposed restrictions on fishing, warning that if nothing was done, “life as we know it in this part of the country will cease to exist. People will be forced to migrate”.
Although fewer in number, fish still exist in Argungu, but “the river has shrunk”, said Ahmed Musa, a 25-year-old fisherman, saying some species had disappeared altogether.
Fishing for “kumba”, a shell women crushed to make black kohl powder used as eyeliner, has all but ceased.
Food insecurity
For farmers lucky enough to cultivate land near the river, they say irrigation is easy and harvests are good mainly “thanks to fertilizers and pesticides”.
For those further away, yields are lower.
“We used to harvest 100 bags of millet from this field, but now we can barely get 60,” said 30-year-old farmer Murtala Danwawa.
The IPCC estimates that climate change has reduced agricultural productivity in Africa by almost 34 percent since the 1960s, greater than any other region.
The UN predicts that 33 million of Nigeria’s 220 million inhabitants will face severe food insecurity this year.
The exponential growth in Kebbi’s population adds to the crisis, in an area that also faces regular attacks by criminal gangs and jihadists.
