‘Whack-a-mole situation’: Algerian officials wrestle with water shortage anger

On 8 June, anger over months of water rationing spilled over in the drought-stricken central Algerian town of Tiaret, where baclava-wearing demonstrators barricaded roads and burned tyres.

Rationing had been introduced to deal with a drought in parts of Algeria and neighbouring Morocco where the amount of rainfall that had historically replenished critical reservoirs was much reduced. Taps had been running dry for months, forcing people in the region – a semi-arid, high-desert plateau increasingly plagued by extreme heat – to queue to access water.

“They promised us a solution before Eid, but here we are still struggling to find drinking water,” Nader, a resident of Tiaret, told the New Arab. “Many people had to postpone the Eid slaughter because of the shortage.”

News of the protests spread rapidly on social media, but garnered little mainstream coverage in Algeria, where press freedoms are severely restricted.

As peak summer season approaches in Algeria, total water reserves in its 81 dams are at only a third of capacity.

Algeria, the largest country in Africa, is dominated by the Sahara, which covers three-quarters of its territory. For years it has invested heavily in climate adaptation, drilling wells for farmers and spending hundreds of millions of pounds on water desalination projects.

In March, Taha Derbal, the minister for hydraulics, told parliament that seven new seawater desalination stations would be built from next year, in addition to five currently under construction. This would double the use of desalinated seawater from the current rate of 18% of the total volume of drinking water, said Derbal.

But some say the state is not acting fast enough.

“There is less and less water for the population across western Algeria, and especially in the steppes and inland plains, which are traditionally pastoral areas,” said Andrew Farrand, the director for Middle East and north Africa (Mena) at the geopolitical risk consultancy Horizon Engage. “That [pastoral] activity now basically cannot happen unless you have a well to get water out from underground. There’s not enough rainwater to keep sheep or goats alive without wells.”

Many in Algeria, the world’s fourth-largest gas exporter, believe the clamour for a reduction in fossil fuel usage is being forced on them by rich western industrialised countries that contribute overwhelmingly more to global greenhouse gas emissions than the developing world.

Climate crisis activists are, meanwhile, calling for a just distribution of the loss and damage funds agreed upon at global conferences such as Cop28 to help places such as Algeria, which are on the frontline of the climate crisis.

“Countries in the global south are the most vulnerable to climate change and our leaders must be vocal on climate financing for polluters to pay,” said Sarra ben Abdallah, the Tunis-based Mena campaigner at Greenpeace.

After the Tiaret riots, President Abdelmadjid Tebboune dispatched the interior minister and water resources minister to fix the situation. After meeting local people, the government fired officials allegedly responsible for misallocating water rations and mobilised trucks to supply the town with water. A long-term solution is also under way: construction of a water pipeline to Tiaret from a dam about 20km (12 miles) away.

Analysts say more demonstrations could happen in the coming months in Algeria, where there is a long history of protests around local service provision failures.

“Essentially, [what we have seen] is part of the mechanism of governance where the government does a pretty insufficient job in providing services in a lot of domains, and when it gets bad enough, people protest,” said Farrand. “Then the government dispatches some resources in a very hasty kind of emergency way that temporarily solves the problem.

“But it’s kind of a whack-a-mole situation to go from one place to another, fixing the problems and never looking at the systemic larger picture, which is that Algeria has a water management problem nationwide,” said Farrand.

Tebboune is expected to stand for a second term in elections in September. Given the state’s tight control of the media, it is not known whether the water crisis will affect votes.

Unlike in the Sahel, where extreme heat has exacerbated a cost-of-living crisis, subsidies of power, water and fuel in Algeria, Africa’s second-largest economy, have somewhat softened the impact on citizens.

Most of the subsidy payments have come from the purse of Sonatrach, the state-owned oil and gas company, which uses profits from deals with foreign companies under a recent hydrocarbons law enacted to draw in more investors.

Activists say this arrangement fosters a cycle in which corporations benefit and ordinary people suffer. “Algerians are bearing the brunt of climate change impacts while international oil companies benefit financially from Algeria’s oil resources,” said Ben Abdallah.