By:Laban Rasalus
The Minister of Agriculture, Water and Land Reform, Calle Schlettwein says building a dam in the Cuvelai area to capture flood water for future use is not possible, and has challenges.
The minister was responding to questions in the National Assembly.
“There are quite a number of challenges in building a deep shallow dam in that area. The whole Cuvelai basin is part of the Kalahari basin, which makes it unsuitable to build a dam because the land is flat in that area and there is a lack of topographical features suitable for building a dam.
“There is no elevation, there are no mountains there, there are no topographical features that create a basin in which you can capture water, it’s extremely flat,” Schlettwein explained.
The Cuvelai-Etosha Basin is a transboundary wetland area shared by Angola and Namibia extending over 450 kilometres from north to south.
The widest point of the basin is along the Angola-Namibia border from the Kunene river east to the Okavango river, which covers approximately 160,000 km².
According to Schlettwein, building a dam would result in losing more water through evaporation in that area because there is a huge surface and no topographical features available whichwill be a waste.
“The result of that dam will be that, you will probably lose more than 80% of the water captured through evaporation,” he said.
He further said there are hundreds of small lakes that provides fresh water during rainy seasons in the area and building a dam in the area will lead to this lakes below the dam to dry up.
Schlettwein said the dam would make it difficult for ground water to be restored to a moderate level that is suitable to drill boreholes in the area, adding that there have been several attempts already in the past to build dams in the area but most of the dams are currently not operating.
He, however,said N$100 million will be availed to build dams in selected areas.
“The government has now decided on a programme to build a number of dams at very carefully selected sites,” he said.
Cuvelai Dam Not Possible, Says Schlettwein
