Nigerian houses swallowed by sand

Ciroma Mohammed is standing on the spot he says was once occupied by his house in north-east Nigeria.

"We lose houses to the desert every year," he says from the village of Bulamadu in Yobe State.

The fine sand is swallowing up houses and roads every year. Almost all the villagers in this dusty arid region say they have lost homes and farms to the Sahara Desert which is expanding southwards.

"What we do is that when the sand moves and buries our homes and farms and even our wells, we simply keep retreating southwards," says Aminu Mahmud, another villager who says he has already lost two different houses to the sand.

He says the situation deteriorates every April when strong pre-rainy season sandstorms sweep sand into their settlements.

Water

"The desert's unrelenting onslaught is pushing us further away from our original homes and it seems there's absolutely nothing we can do about it," Mr Mahmud says.

"The desert has swallowed up our houses, our farms, our roads, our lives. It has changed our livelihoods."
A middle-aged Muslim woman who did not want her photograph taken says women in Bulamadu now spend most of the day travelling long distances in search of potable water.

"Water has become more precious than gold now," the woman who introduced herself as Mairo said, as she sat frying bean cakes known as kosai.

"You wake up one morning and the water well that was there yesterday has been buried under the sand. As a result, most of us women have to trek long distances to get water."

Firewood

The villagers do not seem to see any link between their large appetite for firewood and the advancing sand dunes.

They keep cutting down trees in the vicinity and using sun-dried branches as wood fuel or even as an income earner.
"The impact the advancing desert is having on communities in that area is quite serious," says Jacob Nyanganji of Nigeria's University of Maiduguri which runs a specialist centre for arid zone studies.

"It is true that homes and farms have been lost to desertification in the area and it is also true that people's livelihoods have either been lost or changed completely as a result."

Nature at work

Further east in a village called Damasak, Sani Yunusa, 56, says the sand dunes were "not so strange". He claims he had witnessed something similar as a child.

"The sand should not prevent people from cutting down trees as they have been doing for centuries," he says.

"Desertification is just nature at work and it will reverse itself when it is ready."

But Mr Yunusa is no expert on desertification and the experts say that the march of the sand towards Nigeria's south has become almost irreversible.

And the more trees villagers in Bulamadu and Damask cut down, the faster the sand dunes gallop towards the coastline to the country's south.

Nigerian houses swallowed by sand
By Senan Murray
BBC News website, Yobe State

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Based on the article, explain what is happening in Nigeria.

Is desertification happening due to human activities or due to "nature at work" as Sani Yunusa says.

Research information on the major causes of desertification. Between what you have read in this article and what you learn in your research, come up with possible solutions to this problem. How might the people in Africa work to slow or halt desertificaton?

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