A Continental Call for Accountability, Climate Justice, and Energy Sovereignty: The Case of Baynes Dam in the Epupa Constituency
Executive Summary
If water is life, then rivers must be treated as living entities — not pipelines of profit. Across Namibia’s Epupa constituency, the Himba and OvaTjimba Indigenous communities face a grave threat: the Baynes Hydropower Dam, a joint initiative of the Namibian and Angolan governments, which risks drowning culture, spirit, and heritage in the name of “development.”
Marketed as a beacon of clean energy and prosperity, the Baynes Dam would generate electricity for regional grids and potential export markets. Yet the true price is buried: dispossession of ancestral lands, dislocation of livelihoods, and irreversible harm to a river that has been the lifeblood of pastoralists and traditional fishing communities for centuries.
Promises of compensation and modern energy remain vague, unenforceable, and disjointed from local needs. Meanwhile, biodiversity stands on a precipice — the Kunene River sustains fragile desert ecosystems and holds the last threads of climate resilience in one of southern Africa’s driest regions.
Despite repeated community appeals for transparency and respect, decision-making has been dominated by distant planners and financiers, ignoring thousands of local signatories who demand their right to free, prior, and informed consent.
This paper lifts an Indigenous lens to these injustices. It calls for a moratorium on the Baynes Dam until an independent, community-led, and legally binding impact assessment is completed — one that centers Indigenous rights, climate justice, and authentic energy sovereignty. Only through that accountability can we safeguard sacred rivers, protect cultural continuity, and build a truly sustainable legacy for the next generations.
1. Policy Instruments and Legal Standards
This analysis is rooted in hard-won frameworks of justice and dignity. The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (Principles 4, 6, and 18) obligate states to prevent harm through oversight and transparency. The African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, in Articles 21 and 24, safeguards the right to control natural resources and the right to a healthy environment.
Namibia’s own Environmental Management Act (2007) and Traditional Authorities Act (2000) reinforce these principles, mandating public participation and authentic Indigenous leadership. Likewise, the World Bank Environmental and Social Framework (2022) and the UNFCCC’s Nationally Determined Contributions guidance demand that climate transitions do not trample human rights or traditional land tenure.
Crucially, no irrigation promise — no matter how tempting — can override these legal shields. Irrigation is not a blank cheque to seize ancestral land. Under the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Article 32) and the African Charter, Indigenous communities have the right to choose their own representatives, to define their future on their terms. That right cannot be replaced by a governor’s political “legacy project,” or by token consultations.
If thousands of signatories stand behind their chosen elders and community voices, ignoring them in favor of convenient “recognized” authorities is a breach of UNDRIP, the African Charter, and Namibia’s constitutional guarantees of free association and traditional self-governance.
Across the globe, countries that once championed mega-dams are tearing them down to heal rivers and communities. Europe and North America are dismantling concrete walls that choked ecosystems and culture for decades. Namibia cannot afford to repeat the same mistakes that others are racing to undo.
Let us remember: rivers are not merely resources. They are living archives of collective identity. Under the Precautionary Principle, enshrined in the Rio Declaration, states must pause projects where irreversible harm is reasonably suspected. That is the moral line Baynes threatens to cross.
2. Timeline and Critical Developments on Baynes Dam
For two decades, the Baynes Dam has re-emerged like a ghost, shifting with political winds, fueled by regional ambitions and promises of prosperity.
In the early 2000s, feasibility studies portrayed it as a cornerstone of regional energy transformation. Yet deep community resistance, questions over cultural impacts, and ecological alarms soon stalled its march.
By 2018, the project had been revived, riding the climate bandwagon and regional climate-security narratives. Backers promoted it as a “green” alternative to fossil fuels, but left unspoken the carbon price of drowned forests and rotting organic matter that generates potent methane, a greenhouse gas far more dangerous than CO₂ over a 20-year horizon.
Between 2020 and 2024, new partnerships, including those facilitated through the SADC and the African Development Bank, sought to accelerate the project. However, environmental studies, community consultations, and traditional authorities were bypassed or fragmented, keeping vital information hidden from the very people whose homes and futures were on the line.
This contradiction — a “climate solution” that destroys climate resilience — cannot stand.
3. Key Issues Emerging from Community Engagement
a. Declining River Freedom and Expanding Hydropower
One-third of the world’s rivers still flow free. Two-thirds are already fragmented by concrete and greed (Grill et al., 2019). Africa, far from bucking the trend, is accelerating it — with the Kunene River now in the crosshairs.
Yet every dam that interrupts a river’s breath is also a blow to Indigenous food systems, seasonal grazing, spiritual practices, and biodiversity. Methane emissions from tropical dams, as shown by Barros et al. (2011), can rival coal in climate damage, hidden beneath the water’s surface.
If the Baynes Dam moves forward, the Kunene’s floods — the pulses that nourish people, cattle, fish, and fields — will be shackled. Sediments will fail to reach farmlands. Aquatic life will collapse. Culture itself will be severed from its source.
Can this be called sustainable?
b. Baynes Dam: Built for Export, but at What Cost?
Backers promise the dam will power urban factories, cities, and regional markets. But where is the guarantee that Himba and OvaTjimba homesteads will benefit?
Other African megadams show a grim pattern: energy goes to industry, while ancestral lands are sacrificed for the illusion of national progress. Gravesites submerged, cattle routes erased, sacred rocks blasted — all in the name of a development that rarely serves its original keepers.
Communities demand answers. They deserve them. Development cannot be defined by asphalt dreams that pave over cultural memory.
c. Governance Failures and Financial Risks
The World Bank has classified many large dams as high-risk precisely because they erode trust, saddle governments with unpayable debts, and hide enormous ecological damage.
Yet financiers keep chasing these illusions, propped up by carbon credits and climate finance that still count hydropower as “green,” ignoring the methane data.
Baynes is no different. Costs could balloon, eating up public resources and deepening Namibia’s debt. Meanwhile, participation is tokenistic, and there are no binding benefit-sharing frameworks that protect those who will lose the most.
Communities see this. They see a machine that enriches the few while displacing the many. And they say: enough.
4. Strategic Recommendations
The Baynes Dam cannot proceed without a legal, participatory, and ethical foundation. That means:
✅ Full, public disclosure of Environmental and Social Impact Assessments, feasibility studies, and financing agreements.
✅ Independent, community-led reviews involving Himba and OvaTjimba traditional authorities, environmental experts, and civil society.
✅ Binding, fair, and transparent benefit-sharing and redress frameworks.
Principle 6 of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights makes this a legal obligation — not a favor.
In the medium term, Namibia and Angola should commission a thorough, impartial audit of Baynes, measuring not just technical and financial angles but social, ecological, and cultural survival. That audit must include Indigenous perspectives, echoing Principle 18’s demand for participatory human rights due diligence.
FPIC is non-negotiable. It is not a procedural checklist — it is a birthright of Indigenous communities whose lands and waters are threatened.
In the long term, Africa must pivot away from legacy megaprojects toward community-led, decentralized renewable energy: solar microgrids, mini-hydro, and local storage solutions. These offer climate-smart, inclusive pathways that keep power and profits within communities rather than extracting them for distant elites.
Finally, a continental African Commission on Energy and Ecological Justice should be established to oversee high-risk energy plans, ensuring they align with climate justice, Indigenous rights, and transparent governance.
Way Forward
This position paper will circulate among regional partners and climate negotiators ahead of COP30. It amplifies a continental truth: the era of top-down, exclusionary megaprojects is ending.
The question is no longer whether the Baynes Dam can be built.
It is whether this broken model of development can survive without violating everything we hold sacred about accountability, dignity, and ecological justice.
Comments
Post a Comment