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KABATESI: Rains innocent: We are guilty of ineptitude

African populations are vulnerable to the impacts of climate change because of poverty.

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by KIBISU KABATESI

Siasa02 May 2024 - 15:01
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In Summary


  • Historically, forests have been depleted too rapidly to feed “modernisation” industries and replanting fails because they dry due to less rainfall. 
  • The culprits in consequences of climate change affect all of us, but to react and adapt to these challenges, we must first understand the essentials as they are.
Families affected by floods in Mororo pack along the road after relocating when River Tana burst its banks following heavy rains on April 27, 2024.

I am thinking Nature is innocent. When Mike Sonko pleads “Dear God pls forgive us, maybe our sins are making us experience(sic) this” on X, he is, like many, blaming Nature for the current havoc heavy rains are tutoring Man to.

The evasive “maybe” isn’t strange; Man is very absolvent of the environmental damage wrought on mother Earth. When Sonko pleads “maybe”, he involuntarily gives us a glimpse of the nurture of Man; collagenous, that is, someone else must take blame or something else must be made the culprit.

Sonko, therefore, is only a specimen of indolent world leadership, especially in decision-making roles, who recoil from admitting guilt and therefore fail to invite penitence. Penitence in matters climate change would involve admitting wounding nature and soiling our hands to repair the damage.

When leaders across the spectrum accuse “floods” for the devastation, they exhibit two things; ignorance of what Climate Change is all about, and therefore that floods are a causality of Man’s incessant misconduct since the Garden of Eden.

The simple explanation about climate change is that nature is innocent until you interfere with its regular progression. Much of the disasters we face today are borne of Nature’s impatience with millennium epochs of Climate annihilation.

To explain man’s evasive nature and the mandatory retribution, we should borrow the most amusing legal maxim of equity; "He who comes into Equity must come with clean hands." Man needs clean hands. There are no natural disasters.

Humans haven’t been truthful about its guilt against the climate. Somehow, we have assumed the infiniteness of climate to the extent that we overwhelm it with abandon rather than harness it with restraint.

How else can we explain our disposition to exhaust natural resources in a planet struggling with increases in global temperature, and the regularity of extreme weather that threaten entire species of plants and animals, and now Man?

Dry forests inviting fires is because there is less rainfall and conversely, glaciers in the North and South Poles are shrinking due to warming. But those who understand this co-relationship of consequences that negatively affect the quality of life of many of the world’s populations, have devised escapist “interventions”.

Let me explain. Historically, forests have been depleted too rapidly to feed “modernisation” industries and replanting fails because they dry due to less rainfall and more fires. The culprits in consequences of climate change affect all of us, but to react and adapt to these challenges, we must first understand the essentials as they are:

The “developed” North has devised devious escapism; having nearly depleted the natural surface habitat, they cavernously seek and appropriate natural resources in the underdeveloped South. But these are not infinite and a new hollow repositioning is in vogue – sustainability – the code word for another taunt Green Industrialisation. It means ensuring continued extraction but with green energy generation as a cover.

Covertly, it is within this amorous relationship that the new fad of those who cause more climate change should pay more and to the South, is found. The con game imposes a charge on the emission of greenhouse gases equivalent to the corresponding potential cost caused. Or so it is assumed.

Apparently, emitters should bear the cost of pollution. Couched as “climate financing”, it is sweet music to the emerging unipolar capitalist dominion in which everything, including the very existence of the human race, has a price. But is it?

Kenya’s greenhouse gases emissions are less than 0.1 per cent of global emissions. Africa’s is at a paltry 3.8 per cent, in contrast to 23 per cent in China, 19 per cent in the US, and 13 per cent in the European Union. The sad thing is that in Africa, the emissions are by North-owned enterprises!

South local elites unable to harness a collective will, have bought into climate financing and been exposed badly. For Africa, climate phenomena is represented by extreme temperatures, drought, forest fires, floods, mass movements and tropical storms. It isn’t as yet a matter of fossil fuels which, in any case, the North continues to exploit.

The climate change problem in Kenya, for instance, is not so much El Nino rains or floods. These are predicted with precision in time. The rains are innocent; we could do more with not hindering the natural flow of rivers and where we have interfered for human habitat nourishment, create mitigating infrastructure.

But when did we last adjust Nairobi’s storm water system to accommodate a springily population of 5.5 million from 3.6 million in a decade? Why are we telling victims of our ineptitude to move to high-ground areas today instead of having prevented low-ground settlements in these vulnerable areas?

Everyone from MCAs to Cabinet Secretaries are shading crocodile tears as the death toll rises. They have prevention power to mitigate floods but choose to wait for disaster, maybe because it pays more that way.

Two weeks ago, on a mid-morning jaunt to the rich-Karen outpost in Nairobi, I joined other scared motorists in scampering for safety as streams of storms inherited the roads. Relating the nerve wrecking experience, a friend put my ignorance to test:

“In the natural scheme of things, drops of rain, eh!”, he begun as if to a delicate slow-learner, “especially heavy ones quickly form streams which turn empty into rivers. Rivers, you know, empty into oceans. Oceans, you know, cannot be full”.

I caught on, if you interfere with the space for rain drops and natural flow of streams and rivers, the consequence is rebellion! For Karen residences, the Alma Mater is that they are built on routes of rain drops in Ngong Hills. The lesson is it doesn’t matter how many trees you plant.

This calls for poignant local questions: Why is the Mai-Mahiu road being swept away with innocent lives when we know the mudslide-prone geology of the Rift Valley? Who is designing and approving road construction in the low cactus plains of Makueni and Kajiado? Who settled people and built a dam in Rironi, on the Rift Valley precipice? Who designs and builds dykes in Budalang’i in Busia County that recoil at the feel of raindrops?

At the international level, a clever idea of climate financing is that developing countries steer from fossil fuels. For whose benefit, you may ask. However, there is a more indignant reality; estimates are that Africa requires $277 billion annually to meet 2030 climate goals. Yet annual climate finance flows in Africa are a stingy $30 billion!

What is this reality in real terms in Africa? African populations are vulnerable to the impacts of climate change because of poverty – of both ideas and leadership.

Hence, we are handling a triple jeopardy; a climate tragedy we haven’t created, a deceptive North determined to buy their way out for a penny and our popular ignorance of a selfish strategy.

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