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The Kariba Dam

The External Costs of Building The Kariba Dam

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The construction of the dam and the creation of Lake Kariba involved considerable financial costs. However, there were many additional costs incurred by third parties. These are called external costs.

Resettlement

External Costs of the Kariba Dam

Prior to the building of the dam and the flooding of the Zambezi valley the Gwembe Tonga people lived along the shores of the river. Their economic activity involved gardening, fishing, cropping, keeping cattle, and using wild plants and animals. The river played an important part in their lives providing water, and communication and trading possibilities.

The creation of Lake Kariba involved an estimated 56,000 Gwembe Tonga being relocated to areas away from the river shore. The funding of the project had allocated money for resettlement. However, the actual number of people that had to be moved was considerably more than had been estimated. Many were moved to areas that were harsh and inhospitable and where the soils were poor and infertile. The skills of the Gwembe Tonga were unsuited to these difficult and unproductive new environments. Many were located in existing communities creating causing overcrowding and pressures on land resulting in overgrazing and erosion.

Loss of esteem by the tribal elders and leaders, due to their failure to prevent the resettlement and the migration of young people to the Copperbelt and further afield to the Gold and Diamond mines of South Africa in search for work, resulted in the cohesion of communities breaking down.

The Gwembe Tonga had lived along the shores of the Zambezi River for thousands of years. Their economy, traditions and culture were inseparable from the river. The level of compensation was inadequate and failed to prevent the fragmentation of communities. One irony is that virtually none of the electricity from the Kariba dam was made available to those people who lost their livelihood when the Zambezi was dammed.

External Costs of the Kariba Dam

Environmental Problems
The building of the dam has created a number of environmental problems. The population of the Zambezi valley has grown considerably in the forty years since the dam was built. Towns such as Kariba, Siavonga and Maamba have grown and these discharge a lot of waste material into the lake. The demand for food has put considerable pressure on the surrounding land. Increasingly more and more marginal land has to be cultivated to support people. Overgrazing and loss of soil fertility are both contributing to depleting land quality and soil erosion.

The creation of the lake also had an impact on the Tsetse fly population. The Tsetse fly carries the parasite, Trypanosomiasis that causes sleeping sickness; a debilitating disease for cattle and humans. One of the conditions for resettlement was that the Tsetse were removed prior to people relocating. However there is evidence that the Tsetse have themselves colonised new areas where they have caused problems to local people. This has resulted in Tsetse eradication programmes being introduced.

The removal of tsetse by the intensive spraying of tsetse areas has itself caused additional problems. DDT, although banned in many MDCs, was, and is, still used as an insecticide. This highly toxic chemical has reduced the species of birds, effected the breeding of fish in Lake Kariba and been found in the breast milk of nursing mothers.

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