Words and Ideas: Commitment, Continuity and Irreversibility 139the continued presence and participation of settlers may have to be made through
increased payouts or through services which, at best, reduce revenue to govern-
ment and, at worst, add to a loss. In addition, where government withdrawal is
intended, there is a high risk that it will take longer than expected. At the point at
which implementation of a settlement scheme or programme is considered, all
these factors, all of them implying economic risks, should be weighed.
But these risks do not present the complete picture. Wherever a government
starts a programme or project the actual risks are compounded by the extent to
which the commitment to maintain the programme or project is irreversible. The
process of commitment can be lengthy, subtle and insidious. It begins with an
opportunity and a vision. These may arise from a disturbance in the relationships
of men^4 and land, or the perception of unoccupied land: the Mwea (in Kenya),
inviting development after the Kenya Land Commission’s recommendations; the
bush of South Busoga (in Uganda) after its evacuation in the first decade of this
century; the narrow strip of uncultivated land on the edge of the Rift Valley at
Upper Kitete (in Tanzania); the cleared bush of Kongwa, Urambo and Naching-
wea after the Groundnut Scheme fiasco (in Tanzania). Or the opportunity may be
provided by a resettlement operation which presents a captive population which
can be directed into a new agricultural system: the displacement of Halfawis by the
Aswan Dam, (in Sudan) was exploited through resettlement on the controlled
irrigation scheme at Khasm-el-Girba; and the evacuees from the Volta Lake were
thought to provide ‘a unique opportunity to wean an appreciable proportion of
Ghana’s farmers from the wasteful, fragmented, and shifting system of agriculture
to a settled and improved pattern of farming’.^5
The opportunity attracts and nourishes the idea of a scheme. In such condi-
tions a personal commitment can develop in a man of vision like Simon Alvord in
Rhodesia or Chief Akin Deko in Nigeria. Funds are obtained for surveys: the sur-
veys that are carried out are themselves committing. Where their findings are mar-
ginal, as was the United Nations Special Fund survey of the proposed Tana
Irrigation Project in Kenya,^6 further investigations are called for. It becomes
increasingly difficult to turn back. Once funds have been made available for a
substantive scheme, the successive activities of planning, construction, settlement
and production draw after them deeper and deeper personal, departmental and
political commitments. The establishment of settlers sets a seal on commitment at
a higher level, making abandonment extremely difficult and the use of protective
political arguments extremely easy. The full repertoire of defences to ensure scheme
or programme survival can now be brought into play. Moreover, officials and pol-
iticians in circumstances such as these may regard government funds as fair game,
as an ecological feature to be exploited much as a river might be tapped for irriga-
tion water. The risks involved in the original initiation of a project are now more
obvious: risks not merely that it would fail, but that having failed it would survive
as a parasite that could not be shaken off or killed.
The issues involved in a decision to terminate a scheme are, of course, not
simple. Those responsible for the decisions may not even agree about whether the