The Argungu fishing festival is the kind of event that photographs so well it has almost detached from the town that holds it. Thousands of men enter the Sokoto-Rima at a signal, with hand nets and gourds, and about an hour later somebody is carrying a fish that weighs more than a child.
It has also been cancelled more often than it has been held over the last two decades. The reasons vary — security, funding, administrative drift — but the one Rakiya Ibrahim keeps a record of is the water.
Upstream dams, irrigation offtake and a rainfall pattern that has become harder to plan around have all been offered as explanations, and they are probably all partly right. What matters locally is simpler: the fishing that the festival celebrates is a real livelihood for a real number of households, and it has been getting thinner.
The festival will likely survive, because it is now a matter of state prestige and there is money behind it for that reason. Whether the fishery survives is a different question, and it is not one a festival can answer.
