Eight governors from states bordering the shrinking Lake Chad Basin, are meeting Wednesday and Thursday alongside CSO’s and other developmental bodies to discuss the violence that has plagued the region.
This forum is coming after an initial gathering in Maiduguri, the Borno State capital.
The Lake Chad Basin Commission (LCBC) is quoted by Premium Times as saying that the second forum will look to endorse the ‘Lake Chad Basin Regional Stabilisation, Recovery and Resilience’ initiative which was reached in the first forum in 2018.
The forum is expected “to enhance joint efforts, coordination and. regional ownership to resolve the crisis by promoting cross-border dialogue, cooperation, and exchange, and to support ongoing national, regional and multilateral efforts towards stabilization in the Lake Chad Basin ( LCB )”.
The conveners say one of the objectives of the meeting will be to ‘further institutionalize the Governors’ Forum as a formidable platform to tackle the challenges in the region.’
About two decades after the LCBC was set up in 1964, a grand scheme of diverting water from the Congo River system into the lake has been touted as the solution.
As of March 2018, when a conference on the basin was organized in Abuja, not much had been achieved.
The United Nations estimated that 10.7 million people around the lake that has lost more than 20 percent of its water, depend on humanitarian aid to survive.
The encroaching desert, absence of governance and proliferation of arms that find their way to these parts through the Sahara desert, have given militants hold on the territories of close to 30 million people.
The governors that are in the forum include that of Extreme North, Cameroon; North Region, Cameroon; Diffa, Niger; Adamawa, Nigeria; Borno, Nigeria; Yobe, Nigeria; Hadjer Lamis, Chad and that of Lac Region, Chad.
