Ghana is losing an opportunity to use water from Burkina Faso’s Bagré Dam for irrigation, a policy expert has said.
Mutaru Mumuni Muqthar, Executive Director of the West Africa Center for Counter Extremism, made the remarks in an interview on The Forum, a current affairs programme on Asaase Radio, on Saturday (22 February).
“The Bagré Dam, every year we are spilling the water onto our spaces, that often claim life and property. This is a huge opportunity to cultivate that and make sure we are using it for irrigation purposes. We are losing that opportunity to utilise it and we are suffering for it,” he told the host Wilberforce Asare.
“Because everyday people are evacuated, lives are lost and sometimes there is a lot of fatigue talking about it. Government must take this seriously and put in place a mechanism that addresses it in a very comprehensive and sustainable way.”
Structural weaknesses
Muqthar was adding his voice to a recent terror attack in Burkina Faso on 14 February that led to the death of eight Ghanaian tomato traders.
He linked the issue to Ghana’s heavy dependence on tomato imports from Burkina Faso, arguing that structural weaknesses in agricultural planning and high local production costs are pushing traders to source cheaper produce across the border.
“One of this challenge is the culture of the Ghanaian trader. They bypass and go to Burkina Faso to buy tomatoes because our own is more expensive than what they have in Burkina Faso. And so, the cost of production for them is excessively higher,” he said.
“Some also make the argument that we tend to be exploitative whiles we don’t have enough, those who do have tend to escalate the prices in ways that are prohibitive to the Ghanaian traders. And I think that we need a strategy that is sustainable to ensure that we are dealing with this effectively.”
Northern Ghana is among the areas most affected by Bagré Dam spillages, with communities frequently displaced during the rainy season, while calls for irrigation infrastructure and coordinated cross-border water management have remained largely unmet.
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