Reportage
Lesotho: The Dam Projects
The Lesotho Highlands Water Project was meant to bring mutual benefit — electricity for Lesotho, water for South Africa. Yet for the families affected by the dam, electricity was never a necessity; generations of highland communities lived self-sufficient lives, farming their land and relying on the resources around them. Relocation to urban areas has forced them into a completely new way of living, dependent on money and markets for basic survival.
Lesotho exports vast amounts of water to South Africa every day through the thirty-year-old Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP) — an agreement signed in 1986 between Lesotho’s military regime and South Africa’s apartheid government. The project was intended to supply Johannesburg’s industries with water and to provide Lesotho with income and its own electricity through the Muela Hydropower Station. However, the system is designed in such a way that Lesotho cannot stop the water exports without simultaneously cutting off its own power supply.
Despite South Africa’s dams already being full, the water transfer continues, causing large volumes of water to be wasted. At the same time, new dams such as Polihali are being built, forcing hundreds of families in Lesotho to lose their homes and land. Communities displaced by earlier projects — the Katse and Mohale dams — have still not received the compensation they were promised. Critics argue that the agreement primarily benefits South Africa economically, while the people of Lesotho bear the cost — through lost land, inadequate compensation, and dependence on a treaty that limits the nation’s sovereignty over its own natural resources.
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Hanna Brunlöf is a Swedish photojournalist based in Gothenburg and specalizing news, sport, and documentary photography
