In Summary
Getting the support of peasant farmers for that requires a different level of consent that our politics just does not create. The view, once popular from State House, that because Uganda was going to be oil rich, it could ignore the rest of the world and become a dictatorship, is dead in the water.
Oil prices fell below $35 a barrel for the first time since 2009 this week.
A wise Ugandan had just said on social media earlier that, with the price of oil hitting the floor, it is unlikely the country will be selling its much-spoken-about oil any day soon.
Therefore, he suggested, the campaigns needed to be different. There will be no “easy” oil money and so the elections should be conducted in such a way that at the end of it, tourists and investors would still want to come to Uganda, for we will need their money now that we won’t have petro dollars. Violence against Opposition supporters, therefore, needed to stop – to begin with.
But we don’t have to look to oil to appreciate why we need to behave in a more civilised way politically. Rather, we have to look at climate change.
Look at Ethiopia. It has been Africa’s fastest growing economy and every project it touched seemed to turn to gold.
Then it was hit by its worst drought in over 50 years. It soldiers on, but has been dazed a little. It’s probably a statement of the effectiveness of the government in Addis Ababa that, despite the extreme drought, no deaths have been reported from famine as was the tragic case during the 1980s rule of military tyrant Haile Mariam Mengistu, when possibly a million starved to death.
Another wealthy country Botswana, which once had more foreign exchange reserves than virtually every other nation on the continent, has run out of water. The capital Gaborone is getting its water from over 30 kilometres away.
Likewise, South Africa is seeing its worst temperatures in recorded history, and its big cities are rationing water. Gauteng province, where the commercial Johannesburg sits, gets some of its water from neighbouring tiny Lesotho.
Right now, South Africa can afford to annoy everyone else on earth except Lesotho. The restless kingdom might yank up prices of exported water, but even the type of government in Maseru has become even more important for its big neighbour. South Africa needs an environmentally sensitive leader in Lesotho more than anything.
Up the road, the Kariba Dam, the world’s largest man-made lake, which is shared between Zambia and Zimbabwe, has all but dried. A year ago, the worst case scenarios had its water levels falling by 50 per cent. Two weeks ago, the water levels were down to just 17 per cent.
Kariba supplies the two countries with a big part of their electricity, and in Zambia, mines are shuttering, laying off workers, and the treasury is running dry. Zimbabwe, well, is desperate. We need not say more.
The meaning of this for politics in general in Africa, and countries like Uganda are far-reaching.
Until climate change hit, most of our problems could be solved by conventional means.
But ensuring that dams don’t dry up, requires something that many African countries, Uganda being as good an example as any, never really needed before as an existential issue – science.
The countries that will survive climate change, are the ones that are willing to hand power and resources to scientists. Secondly, they need to be able to persuade people to make radical behaviourial changes toward the environment and their own lands.
If you’ve watched a programme called “China from the air” on DSTV, watch again. If you haven’t, try to.
Though it’s not the main point of the programme, what is stunning about it is how, while the Chinese don’t have a free vote, an incredible amount of power and resources have shifted into the hands of scientists.
China has the world’s largest deployment of scientists and engineers out in the world working on renewable energy projects, in a race to save their country from death by pollution.
China is one of the reasons that investments in clean energy have far out-stripped those in fossil fuels globally – with emerging markets spending even more money than developed economies.
Thus China is a vast experimental field for renewables, and my own sense is that, ironically, the tipping point that will make green energy dirt cheap will come from that leading polluter.
To complicate matters, until now, at the lower level of families and communities, incentives for farmers and land owners were reducible into economic outcomes. You irrigated your crops, used modern farming methods, and you could get a higher yield and make more money.
Using organic manure, planting trees and shrubs, however, will pay off in a distant uncertain future. Getting the support of peasant farmers for that requires a different level of consent that our politics just does not create.
The view, once popular from State House, that because Uganda was going to be oil rich, it could ignore the rest of the world and become a dictatorship, is dead in the water.
Mr Onyango-Obbo is editor of Mail & Guardian AFRICA (mgafrica.com). Twitter:@cobbo3
0 comments:
Post a Comment