The Sahara's Sands rapid advance is engulfing Nigerian villages
Pastor Dale Morgan
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The Sahara's Sands rapid advance is engulfing Nigerian villages
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By Senan Murray
BBC News website, Yobe State
Ciroma Mohammed is standing on the spot he says was once occupied by his
house in north-east Nigeria.
"We lose houses to the desert every year," he says from the village of
Bulamadu in Yobe State.
Desertification is just nature at work and it will reverse itself when
it is ready
Sani Yunusa
Disappearing Lake Chad
The fine sand is swallowing up houses and roads every year.
Almost all the villagers in this dusty arid region say they have lost
homes and farms to the Sahara Desert which is expanding southwards.
"What we do is that when the sand moves and buries our homes and farms
and even our wells, we simply keep retreating southwards," says Aminu
Mahmud, another villager who says he has already lost two different
houses to the sand.
He says the situation deteriorates every April when strong pre-rainy
season sandstorms sweep sand into their settlements.
Water
"The desert's unrelenting onslaught is pushing us further away from our
original homes and it seems there's absolutely nothing we can do about
it," Mr Mahmud says.
Ciroma Mohammed
Ciroma and his fellow villagers keep moving southwards
"The desert has swallowed up our houses, our farms, our roads, our
lives. It has changed our livelihoods."
A middle-aged Muslim woman who did not want her photograph taken says
women in Bulamadu now spend most of the day travelling long distances in
search of potable water.
"Water has become more precious than gold now," the woman who introduced
herself as Mairo said, as she sat frying bean cakes known as kosai.
"You wake up one morning and the water well that was there yesterday has
been buried under the sand. As a result, most of us women have to trek
long distances to get water."
Firewood
The villagers do not seem to see any link between their large appetite
for firewood and the advancing sand dunes.
Firewood pile
The need for firewood overrides other concerns
They keep cutting down trees in the vicinity and using sun-dried
branches as wood fuel or even as an income earner.
"The impact the advancing desert is having on communities in that area
is quite serious," says Jacob Nyanganji of Nigeria's University of
Maiduguri which runs a specialist centre for arid zone studies.
"It is true that homes and farms have been lost to desertification in
the area and it is also true that people's livelihoods have either been
lost or changed completely as a result."
Nature at work
Further east in a village called Damasak, Sani Yunusa, 56, says the sand
dunes were "not so strange". He claims he had witnessed something
similar as a child.
Map
"The sand should not prevent people from cutting down trees as they have
been doing for centuries," he says.
"Desertification is just nature at work and it will reverse itself when
it is ready."
But Mr Yunusa is no expert on desertification and the experts say that
the march of the sand towards Nigeria's south has become almost
irreversible.
And the more trees villagers in Bulamadu and Damask cut down, the faster
the sand dunes gallop towards the coastline to the country's south.