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It is apparent that more people across the continent are becoming aware of climate change, in one way or another. |
For the past few years, debates have been raging on the subject of climate change. Sustained media reports generated from these debates have consequently done well in keeping the topic on people's minds.
These reports have gone to great lengths to highlight the dangers posed, for instance, by the mounting levels of noxious gases in the earth's atmosphere. For a good reason, this has been blamed on industrial activity, fossil fuels, and deforestation.
Words such as carbon credits, biofuels, fair trade, and rising sea levels are fast becoming hackneyed topics. Undoubtedly, this points to the fact that the subject has been extensively explored.
However, the participants taking lead roles in these discussions are, invariably, featured scientists and experts. The common person on the streets of Tripoli, for instance, or in a Namibian village off the beaten track has not been afforded much attention in such deliberations.
So, what are the views of some of the people from the far-flung villages and streets of Africa, a continent regarded by experts as being on the receiving end of adverse weather conditions attributed to climate change?
Disrupting Our Way of Life
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"The climate change phenomenon has changed our lives," says Baashoom.
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Amna Baashoom, a 38-year-old widow and uneducated farmer from Baw, the Blue Nile state in southern Sudan, explains to IslamOnline.net that although she is not very well versed with the subject, she does have an inkling on what the subject entails.
"The climate change phenomenon has changed our lives," says Baashoom. "We depend on rain-fed agriculture here, but the rains sometimes are too heavy and destroy our entire crop. At other times, it is too little to support any kind of meaningful agriculture."
A mother of five who belongs to the Al-Angasana tribe, Baashoom says that her region has witnessed an abnormal change in rainfall patterns in a few years' time and that this has disrupted the region's way of life in a big way. This has meant that the family of six has had to adopt a seminomadic lifestyle, moving from place to place and looking for pasture for their cattle.
"When there is too little rainfall, our animals cannot find grass to feed on, thus cannot produce milk for the children to drink," says Baashoom, adding that the children then incessantly fall sick and the livestock die as a result of the drought.
It is apparent that more people across the continent are becoming aware of climate change in one way or another.
Uche Ikide, a 30-year-old taxi driver in downtown Lagos, Nigeria, says that climate change remains well reported on in Nigerian media, and therefore most people know about it.
He points out a significant development that took place in early June 2009 when the royal Dutch Shell Oil Company was accused of collusion in the 1995 execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa, an environmental and human rights activist in Nigeria. The company agreed to fork out US$15.5 million to settle a lawsuit brought against it.
"We all know that fossil fuels are major environmental pollutants and, by extension, contributors to climate change. So, how can Nigerians not have something to say with all the goings-on at the Niger River Delta?" Izugbara wonders.
What is clearly evident across the continent is the fact that people are much more concerned about reduced rainfall or increased frequency of floods than anything else. They say that either way, their harvest has been markedly reduced, owing to crop failure due to drought or destruction of crops caused by floods.
Bakari Kaggwa, a 46-year-old father of three and a banana farmer in the Mbarara District in southwestern Uganda, is one of those concerned about the frequency of disasters, such as drought and famine.
"My house and crops were destroyed in the El Ni?o floods of 1998, and I am afraid that these floods will come back again to ruin lives once more," says Kaggwa, blaming it all on climate change.
Unbearable Life
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| "We all know that fossil fuels are major environmental pollutants and by extension contributors to climate change." |
For people like Baashoom and their families, life has become particularly unbearable. She says that with little or absent rainfall they have had no livelihood to speak of. Without a source of income, she is forced to send her children to distant homesteads where they toil as farmhands so they can bring in some money and send it back home.
"We do not know how to deal with this, but we are patient that policies can be formulated that will address and hopefully reduce the impact of climate change," she says, "Then we can go back and live in our ancestral homes again."
Besides her children's working on other people's farms, Baashoom has enrolled in an income-generating program supported by World Vision, an international charity. The organization supports women like Baashoom, whose farmlands have been rendered barren, by providing them with vegetable seeds.
"Under this program, we cultivate vegetables which World Vision assists in finding the market for," says Baashoom.
The spread of diseases in areas where they never existed before is also becoming a concern. The spread of malaria in areas where the disease has never been is causing some concerns in Kenya.
"I am not an expert on climate change, but I have read about malaria being reported in Kenyan highlands, something that never used to be the case," says Jane Adhiambo, a 23-year-old journalism student at the Nairobi-based Kenya Polytechnic University College.
She explains that in the Nandi Highlands in western Kenya for example, malaria cases are now being reported, setting a new precedent in the spread of the disease.
"Rising temperatures are responsible for this. High temperatures create a conducive environment for the mosquito to thrive," she says.
As far as she is concerned, this is a disturbing development, given that in malaria-endemic areas of the country inhabitants have developed some resistance to the disease, while this is not the case in areas where the disease has begun to appear.
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