Harvesters will soon start clearing water hyacinth from Lake Victoria around Kisumu and Homa Bay.
Unfortunately this will be only a short-term solution. Water hyacinth multiplies so fast that it will soon return in earnest.
The weed cuts off light to the water below so small fish lose their breeding grounds, thereby reducing fish stocks deeper in the lake. It needs to be eradicated.
But the mat can be so heavy that it weighs 200 tonnes per acre. It is very difficult to remove manually or mechanically when huge areas are covered.
In Uganda in the 1990s infestation was as bad as Kisumu today. The government initially used chemical spraying to get rid of the water hyacinth. However pesticides causes the dead hyacinth to fall to the lake bottom where it rots and de-oxygenates the water.
Water hyacinth is an invasive from the Amazon where two weevils feed exclusively on it. They multiply as they eat the hyacinth but die off once the weed is finished and they have no food. The weevils have been tried in various African countries including Uganda and have not become invasive.
Only the weevils can effectively remove large areas of hyacinth in an environmentally safe way.
Quote of the day: "The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain." - Dolly Parton, The American country singer was born on 19 January, 1946