COLUMN ONE : Progress vs. Paradise in Africa? : Behind a struggle over the world’s largest inland river delta are classic tensions--the appetite of a modern, growing populace versus the continent’s ecological treasures.

Out on the edge of the forbidding Kalahari Desert, far from any sea, a mystical inland network of waterways and islands known as the Okavango River Delta has supported many generations of Africa’s fishermen.

Old-timers say that the sweet-water delta is a living thing, willful and easily angered. It can swell and turn, vanish and reappear.

But tamper with it, they warn, and it will die.

Government officials in Botswana aren’t believers. They want to scrape the bottom of one of the delta’s rivers to bring extra water to city dwellers, farmers, cattle and diamond mines on arid lands far beyond its reach.

The government plan has touched off a bitter dispute between the river-educated locals and officials in Botswana’s capital, Gaborone, 550 hard miles distant. And behind that furor is a classic tale of today’s Africa--the tenacious appetite of a modern, growing population versus a rare, unspoiled ecological wonderland.

Elsewhere in Africa, demand for farmland has threatened the rain-forest habitat of the lowland gorillas that Dian Fossey made famous in Rwanda. In Kenya, Zimbabwe and Namibia, poaching for skins, horns and food has put pressure on bountiful wildlife reserves.

Development projects pose their own special threat, and the usual pattern is that factories and office buildings are constructed, and rivers rerouted, without a murmur of public debate. Dams were built in northern Kenya and Mozambique in recent years without consulting the citizens or studying the environmental effects.

But the Okavango project in Botswana is different. The country’s leaders are bound by a long tradition of democracy, a rarity in Africa, to get the go-ahead from the local voters. And the result has been an intense public debate, joined by international environmentalists and watched by the rest of the continent.

“I’d be lying if I said this project would not have any environmental impact,” said Moremi Sekwale (sek-WALL-ay), the government’s director of water affairs. “It will. But the benefits far outweigh the environmental costs.

“There is a genuine need for water,” he added. “Botswana is a very arid country. And water is crucial to development.”

But many of the intended beneficiaries disagree. They aren’t convinced that they need more water, and they doubt that the project is the best way to produce it anyway.

More important, they fear that the project will turn a large section of the fragile swamps into a desert, like the Kalahari next door.

“We don’t know for sure,” admitted Hazel Wilmot, who runs a produce company in Maun on the edge of the delta. “But past history has shown that the moment you touch this delta, you cause irreparable damage. Something always goes wrong. The whole area is so vital, and it changes from season to season.”

The Okavango is the world’s largest inland delta, a fresh-water everglade formed by the Okavango River as it charges down from the Angolan highlands northwest of Botswana. Soon after entering Botswana’s flatlands, the river abruptly fans out into a giant hand--160 miles long by 90 miles wide after the yearly rains. Its wet fingertips disappear into the ancient sands of the Kalahari.

The result is a pristine African wilderness. Zebra, elephant, giraffe, wildebeest, buffalo and kudu roam small islands anchored by leathery, 1,000-year-old baobab trees and tall palms rattling in the breeze.

The water, six feet deep in some places, spawns prairies of thick papyrus and water lilies as big as bicycle tires. Beneath the water swim hippo, crocodile and dozens of varieties of fish and water lizards.

Nights in the delta are filled with the cacophony of tiny bell frogs, each no larger than a fingernail, and the thrashing of hippos as they leave the water to forage for food on land.

River’s Guardians

Dozens of small villages totally depend on the delta for their existence. The residents eat fish and the sweet roots of water lilies. They use the sturdy reeds and papyrus to make houses, fences, furniture and even pillows.

Galebose Tshekonyane (shek-on-YA-nay), a tall, muscular 47-year-old was loading his makoro, or canoe, on the delta recently. It was heaped with axes, knives, fishing nets, blankets, an old trash can full of food, a brown briefcase and a large cooler for the fish he hoped to catch.

Tshekonyane and a friend were preparing for their regular journey into the delta aboard the 20-foot makoro, carved from the trunk of a mopani tree. Each man had a 10-foot pole, with a fork at one end, for propulsion.

“Wherever we spend the night,” Tshekonyane said, “we will have food because of our nets and the river.”

Tshekonyane believes that the government’s plan to dredge part of the delta “will kill this river,” as it killed two other rivers that were tampered with by private mining firms several decades before.

“Our lives depend on this river,” he said. “If not for the river, some of us would be thieves because we wouldn’t have enough to eat.”

Then Tshekonyane waved to his wife and pushed the canoe through a wedge of reeds into the fast-moving channel, silently poling his way upstream.

Back at the village of reed huts a short walk away, the chief, Tshekonyane’s father, said: “Nobody wants this river to be touched because they know it will die. If that happens, I will just die as well.”

The government wants to dredge a 26-mile stretch of the lower Boro River, one of the five major rivers flowing from the Okavango. The goal is to deepen and widen the channel, making it larger and more efficient in the hope of increasing the water flow.

Greenpeace’s Role

Most of the vocal opponents of the $25-million project live in nearby Maun, a dusty settlement of 20,000 with a single paved road, noisy four-wheel drive vehicles and a busy airport from which tourists are transported to camps in the heart of the delta.

Greenpeace, the international environmental activist group, sent a team of scientists to Maun earlier this year to study the project. It concluded that the dredging would cause irreparable damage to the Boro River and changes in the habitat that would drive away wildlife, including two species of birds, the endangered wattled crane and the rare slaty egret.

The project “is an unjustified and totally unacceptable encroachment into the Okavango Delta,” the Greenpeace team said in its report. And it warned that the water development might tempt future governments to further exploit the delta’s abundant water supplies.

The government acknowledges that the dredging will change the environment, but not by much. It says the project would affect only one-thirtieth of the entire delta.

But Greenpeace and local residents point out that the Okavango is an ecosystem in flux, with frequent earthquakes and unreliable rainfall regularly redrawing the delta’s map. They say no one really knows the delta, least of all the starched shirts in Gaborone.

“We don’t read this in textbooks,” said Isaac Tudor, 63, who lives on the delta’s edge. “We have been here all our lives. We are born in this river.”

No one knows for sure what will happen if the river is dredged. Some fishermen worry that deepening the channel will wipe out spawning grounds for fish. Others say that scraping the smooth silt from the river bottom will cause water to disappear into the sand below.

“We have only a small stream. If you make a hole in it, it will leave,” said Emmanuel Lekelandi (Lek-ay-LAWN-day), a 20-year-old fisherman near Maun.

Government’s Plan

Botswana’s president, Quett Masire (Maw-sear-ay), has called opponents of the plan “a small group of little people.” But he is bound by the country’s tradition of participatory democracy to consult them--and to listen to them.

Botswana is one of only two free-market, multi-party democracies on the continent. A prime feature of its political process is the kgotla, or town meeting. At a kgotla here in May, the government’s top water officials, flown in from the capital, were chastised by the local citizenry for planning to dredge the river.

“The project is meant for the people, and we need their agreement,” said Sekwale, the country’s water affairs director. “It wouldn’t make sense for us to go ahead if all the people affected didn’t want it.”

As a result, the government has temporarily suspended its dredging plans. But it hasn’t given up hope on the project.

“The people say they don’t want the dredging, but they want more water,” Sekwale said. “That is the dicey situation we face.”

Botswana’s Needs

Water is crucial to development in Botswana, a nation of just 1.3 million people about the size of California and Arizona combined that is situated north of South Africa. The landscape is dominated by the Kalahari Desert, and average rainfall is about equal to that of Los Angeles.

Diamonds, mined in a joint government venture with De Beers, account for 80% of the country’s exports and give Botswana one of the highest incomes per person in Africa. Cattle exports to Europe account for most of the remaining exports. Tourism is the third-largest industry.

The government says the dredging would provide water for the growing needs of Maun, which has introduced rationing several times in recent years. But Maun residents say the government hasn’t properly studied the alternatives.

Another important beneficiary would be a diamond mine at Orapa, 160 miles away, which uses water to wash away tons of mud. Although the Orapa mine has ample water now, it has been drawing down the underground supplies. Water officials worry that the supply will dry up long before the mine’s 100-year life span ends.

“In Botswana, water is more valuable even than diamonds,” explained Sekwale. “We will mine the diamonds and use them while they last. But we can never afford to use up our (ground) water. It must be there forever.”

And using some of the vast waters from the Okavango is one way to keep the country secure.

But out on the richly endowed delta, where the stars seem to crash into the horizon, water for cities and farms and mines is not a primary concern.

“I figure this could be the last decade for the delta,” said Willie Phillips, a 55-year-old hunter and safari guide for well-heeled foreign tourists. “If we don’t do something now to preserve it, I’m afraid we can write the Okavango off as an ecological haven.”