Twenty-Five Chadians Killed Over a Watering Hole, and N'Djamena Looks Away

On Friday, October 30, in southwestern Chad, at least twenty-five people were killed and twenty-two others wounded. Twenty-five lives. Over what? Over water. Over a watering point near Koula, where a Kreda herder tried to water his livestock. An argument broke out with a Kouka farmer. The herder pulled out his weapon and shot his opponent in the foot. Within hours, two entire communities were firing on each other.

Let us ask what this says about us. Has a bullet in a man's foot now become enough to start a civil war in miniature? If the answer is yes, then it was not the watering hole that killed these twenty-five people. It was the weapon. And it was the state that let that weapon circulate.

An Old Conflict, Now Deadly

Clashes between herders and farmers are not new in Chad. In a region where land and water are scarce, where livestock must cross fields to find something to drink, these tensions have always existed. The elders knew how to settle them through mediation, through dialogue, through agreements on passage and sharing between families and canton chiefs. What has changed is the lethality. A quarrel that once ended in apologies, a fine, or a few blows now ends with bodies laid out in rows.

Political scientist Yamingué Betinbaye, a specialist in conflict in Chad, has identified the cause. When civilians possess weapons of war, those weapons give them the upper hand in a dispute. They reassure them and push them to believe they can win. And as soon as the first shot is fired, everyone pulls out what they have. The conflict no longer gets resolved. It spirals.

Let us do the math that no one wants to do. A weapon of war circulating in a village is a weapon waiting for its moment. It does not ask who is right in the quarrel over water. It kills the first person it is pointed at, and the death toll climbs within the hour.

Why the Guns Are There

These weapons do not fall from the sky. Chad shares long, porous borders with Libya, Sudan, the Central African Republic, Niger, and Cameroon. Since 2023, the war in Sudan between the army and the Rapid Support Forces has sent more than a million refugees across eastern Chad and broken the barriers that kept weapons on the other side of the border. Stockpiles from the Libyan civil war, shipments moving across the Sahel, AK-47s left over from earlier conflicts: all of it feeds a grey economy that no one is accounting for.

And in N'Djamena, officials keep asking why the population no longer trusts the security forces. The answer is simple. A citizen who sees militias and armed groups moving about unchecked, who knows that justice will not follow, who knows a killer can wait years before standing trial, that citizen no longer trusts the state. He takes up his weapon, because that is what he has been taught to do.

Chad has nonetheless signed regional instruments against the proliferation of small arms, notably the ECCAS Kinshasa Convention on the control of small arms in Central Africa. These texts remain largely dead letters in the countryside. We sign in Libreville, in Kinshasa, in Addis Ababa, and we let the watering holes become battlefields.

What the Power Does Not Want to See

We must say it plainly. Chad has been governed since 2021 by Mahamat Idriss Déby Itno, who came to power after the death of his father, Idriss Déby, under circumstances that many Chadians have denounced as a disguised dynastic succession. Since then, repression of the opposition has hardened. Succès Masra, a prominent opposition figure, was sentenced to a heavy prison term in 2025. Elections have been held under tight control. A constitutional revision has opened the way to a presidency with no limit on terms.

A power that concentrates everything, that weakens every check on its authority, that silences the press and the parties, has no time to deal with a watering hole in Logone or Mayo-Kebbi. Yet it is precisely there that the daily lives of millions of Chadians are at stake. The safety of a herder, the safety of a farmer, the safety of a mother going to fetch water. A state that does not protect these people is not a state at all. It is merely an apparatus that extracts.

What Must Change

We are not condemned to these massacres. Africa has models that prove another path is possible. Botswana, which built its stability on solid institutions, rigorous management of its resources, and genuine political alternation, put in place a pastoral land policy and clear rules for access to pastures and water points as early as the 1970s. It is not perfect, but the rule of law there outranks the rule of the best-armed. Ghana and Senegal have shown that local mediation committees, recognized by law and backed by the state, can defuse land disputes before they turn deadly.

So here is what we demand, concretely.

First, a national program to collect and destroy weapons of war held by civilians, backed by clear sanctions for illegal possession and a limited amnesty for those who surrender their weapons voluntarily. A state that wants peace must first reclaim its monopoly on violence.

Second, an official mapping of water points and transhumance corridors, drawn up with traditional chiefs, herders, and farmers, and protected by a legal text. When access to water is governed by law, a quarrel no longer needs a gun to be settled.

Finally, a justice system that acts swiftly and fairly. The shooter at Koula must answer before a court, and so must the farmer who fired back. There is no security in a country where everyone knows a murder will never be judged. Independent justice is not a Western luxury. It is the minimum condition for people to stop taking the law into their own hands.

Our Appeal

Dear Chadian compatriots, dear Africans of the Sahel and Central Africa, we cannot accept that twenty-five people can fall over a watering hole without anyone being brought to justice. We must demand that our governments disarm civilians, protect water points, and prosecute every killer, without distinction of ethnicity or clan. We must demand that regional bodies, ECCAS and the African Union, stop issuing communiqués and enforce their own conventions on small arms. We must demand that our journalists follow these cases to the end, and that our elected officials be held accountable.

The blood of Koula must not dry on the ground without anyone answering for it. For these twenty-five dead and the twenty-two wounded, the only worthy response is a justice system that works, a state that protects, and a society that refuses to normalize the gun as a way of settling disputes. We must act now, before the next watering hole.

Based on reporting by ACSS-EMAIL