Fishes 2023, 8, 64. https://doi.org/10.3390/fishes8020064 www.mdpi.com/journal/fishes Article Proposed Solutions to the Problems of the Lake Chad Fisheries: Resilience Lessons for Africa? Nwamaka Okeke-Ogbuafor 1, *, Tim Gray 2 , Kelechi Ani 3 and Selina Stead 1 1 School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK 2 School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU, UK 3 Department of History and Strategic Studies, Alex Ekwueme Federal University, Abakaliki 480211, Nigeria * Correspondence: n.a.okeke-ogbuafor@leeds.ac.uk Abstract: Fishing communities in Lake Chad are experiencing humanitarian crises—more than five million people in the region are hungry and malnourished—and fishers are in dire need of im- proved fisheries management policies. Understanding the fishers’ resilience, and how they per- ceive their fisheries policies, could provide an opportunity for governments and fisheries managers to refine their policies. The present study, which is based on 38 semi-structured interviews carried out between January and April 2022 on the Nigerian shores of Lake Chad, breaks new ground, firstly by seeking to understand the issues raised by declining fish stocks in Lake Chad from the viewpoints of fishers themselves; and secondly by making use of resilience theory to interpret the fishers’ responses to their situation. Our findings are that the fishers have a surer grasp of the most effective resilience strategies available to them than external bodies; and that the fishers’ adaptive resilience and local knowledge provide a framework for developing smarter fisheries management policies for Lake Chad. This study provides evidence to support recommendations for Africa’s supranational, national and local governments to invest in, and make use of, the fisheries research on the ground to address the problems facing its fisheries, rather than experimenting with seem- ingly random ideas from across the globe. The Lake Chad fisheries crisis is an extreme case demonstrating the harmful effects of external influences from which the fisheries of other African countries can learn lessons. Keywords: sustainable fisheries management; resilience theory; expert and external management; indigent and internal management 1. Introduction Lake Chad was once the largest lake in West Africa, the fourth largest in Africa and the eleventh in the world [1]. However, according to some writers, between the 1960s and the 1990s it shrank by 90% and, in its current form, can no longer support the 30-plus million people who once depended on it for water and fish [2,3]. Fishing from this lake is an old but important source of livelihood [4–8]. The Lake Chad fisheries have experi- enced two major development phases: before the 1960s and after the 1960s [9]. Before the 1960s, fishing was mostly for subsistence purposes; fisherfolk fished with hooks, nets, traps, paddling canoes, and shallow water boats [9] and harvests were relatively low—between 10 and 20,000 tonnes of fish were landed yearly [9]. During this time, although relatively little was known about fish stocks in the lake [9], a 2018 United Na- tions report stated that Lake Chad was home to 135 species of fish. These species were distributed unevenly across the lake due to the distances between riverine systems and the various types of aquatic facie [10]. For example, the southern basin was fish rich with Ichthyborus besse, Siluranodon auratus and Polypterus senegalu, whereas in open water are- as, Labeo coubie, Citharinops distichodoides and large Synodontis membranaceus were abun- dant; and indigenous species, including Oreochromis niloticus and Sarotherodon galilaeus Citation: Okeke-Ogbuafor, N.; Gray, T.; Ani, K.; Stead, S. Proposed Solutions to the Problems of the Lake Chad Fisheries: Resilience Lessons for Africa? Fishes 2023, 8, 64. https://doi.org/10.3390/fishes8020064 Academic Editor: Dimitrios Moutopoulos Received: 24 November 2022 Revised: 6 January 2023 Accepted: 18 January 2023 Published: 20 January 2023 Copyright: © 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/license s/by/4.0/).