Paradise lost?
‘The destruction is unimaginable,’ says Nnimmo Bassey, director of the Health of Mother ‘The Earth Foundation. ‘It’s going to be huge. If Namibia goes in the direction they’re moving, it will be terrible for local people, for the African continent and for the planet.’
Bassey is one of many campaigners fighting to save the pristine ecosystems of Namibia and Botswana’s Kavango Region, a ‘natural paradise’ that contains remarkable biodiversity. Canadian oil and gas company ReconAfrica has claimed that the Kavango Basin holds 120 billion barrels of oil. The company has secured exploration licenses covering a total of 34,325 square kilometres in northeast Namibia and northwest Botswana and plans to create an oil and gas field the size of Belgium, taking in the buffer zones of three Namibian National Parks, community conservancy lands and forests.
African and international activists and organizations, including Fridays For Future Windhoek, SOUL (Save Okavango’s Unique Life) and Greenpeace are calling for ReconAfrica’s fossil fuel exploration in Kavango to stop, envisaging a disaster. Kavango East and Kavango West in northern Namibia are currently home to around 200,000 people, including the indigenous San, with the wider threatened area, encompassing the Okavango
