Across much of Africa, water policy over recent decades has followed a familiar and seemingly rational path: build large dams, drill deeper wells, transfer water across basins, and increasingly rely on desalination. These investments were often necessary, and in many cases prevented immediate crises.

But they also expose a deeper failure in how water security has been conceptualized.

The dominant policy question—how do we mobilize more water?—reflects a narrow, supply-centered mindset. In a context of climate disruption, degraded lands, and rising energy costs, this question is no longer sufficient. A more unsettling one must be confronted: why does so much water fail to remain where it falls?

Scarcity as a political and territorial outcome

Hydrology and soil science offer a straightforward explanation. Water availability is not determined by rainfall alone, but by the condition of land, soils, and vegetation.

Degraded territories shed water quickly. Rain becomes runoff, erosion, floods, and lost groundwater recharge. Healthy landscapes do the opposite: they slow water down, absorb it, and redistribute it over time.

Scarcity, from this perspective, is not merely climatic. It is political and territorial. It is the cumulative result of land-use decisions that treated soil as inert, ecosystems as expendable, and water as something to be captured, transported, and controlled elsewhere—often far from the communities and landscapes that generated it.

Restoring cycles, not expanding extraction

What is needed is not another technological fix layered onto an already strained system, but a shift in priorities: away from perpetual extraction and toward restoring the conditions that allow water to remain within landscapes.

Rehydrating degraded territories strengthens food security, reduces disaster risks, lowers dependence on energy-intensive systems, and stabilizes rural livelihoods. These outcomes are rarely accounted for in infrastructure-driven cost–benefit analyses, yet they are central to social stability and long-term resilience.

This is not an argument against infrastructure. It is an argument against the illusion that infrastructure alone can compensate for degraded ecosystems and dysfunctional territorial governance.

Power, coordination, and responsibility

Landscape restoration is not a neutral technical exercise. It is inherently political. It raises questions about who controls land, whose knowledge counts, and which time horizons matter.

Restoring hydrological cycles requires coordination across ministries, legal frameworks that protect long-term ecological processes, and a willingness to recognize local and traditional practices that have often been sidelined by centralized, top-down planning.

The role of the state is not to micromanage nature, but to redefine success: not only in cubic meters delivered, but in risks reduced; not only in projects completed, but in systems stabilized.

Sovereignty beyond infrastructure

Water sovereignty cannot be measured solely by the height of dams or the output of desalination plants. It is measured by a society’s capacity to maintain the ecological and territorial conditions that make water accessible, affordable, and resilient over time.

The difference between scarcity and resilience is not rainfall. It is how power is exercised over land, knowledge, and long-term choices.

Until water policy confronts these structural realities, scarcity will continue to be treated as a technical failure – when it is, in fact, a management one.

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