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Southern Africa has experienced a phenomenal change in rainfall patterns making crop planning quite difficult and drought patterns more prevalent

Nick Mangwana View from the Diaspora
Zimbabwe and a large part of Southern and East Africa has been grappling with one of the most devastating droughts not experienced in recent times. Thirty six million people are said to be experiencing this catastrophe. To that add some furnace like temperatures and some Siberian cold in winter. The

direct cause has been attributed to what is known as El Nino events and this is not the first time these events have turned well known and predictable weather patterns on its head. Southern Africa has experienced a phenomenal change in rainfall patterns making crop planning quite difficult.

We are told that this will continue and the world has got to get used to this catastrophe. But we are also told that these problems are man-made. They say that the human race has emitted so much industrial gasses and other dirty emissions until they created what is commonly known as global warming and disrupted weather patterns as well as cause the said droughts. But what is clear is that it is not the countries that are experiencing the most damaging effect of the extreme weather patterns that caused them in the first place.

Now everybody is being asked to sign up to one protocol after another to ensure that this damage is minimised.

Most industrialised countries have had a developmental head start and in the process damaged our collective environment.

As a result, we are experiencing the droughts and a strain on our poor resources. Is it too much then to ask them to pay for all the effects the drought is having on over 36 million of our people in the Sub Saharan region? Granted, they come with some sort of money as aid, but let us talk of real compensation here for damages caused.

Asking developed countries for compensation is something the third world has never been able to do. Those countries formerly colonised have never been able to ask and get compensation. Those countries that suffered from slavery have never been able to successfully claim compensation either. This is because the countries that are culpable are very ‘powerful’ and they are the ones making the rules and the rest for the world just has to follow. When these very countries were affected by Nazism, they were compensated.

This is not some anti-West crusade. This columnist does not subscribe to the notion that this world will be better if the have-nots increase the decibels of their annoyance with the haves. But if one remembers, in February 2000, we experienced floods which killed 600 people in the region and destroyed infrastructure mainly in Zimbabwe, Mozambique and South Africa. They told us that it was called Cyclone Eline and it displaced over 20 000 people in Zimbabwe.

Money had to be found to rehabilitate communication systems and infrastructure that had been damaged. This took a long time under trying economic conditions for our country.

Having just recovered from the combined effect of this, disengagement and hostility from the West and all the other punitive measures that came with it (the S-word is being avoided here) we are back there with uncharacteristic weather patterns which have now caused about 4 million people to need supplementary feeding and drought relief in Zimbabwe.

The resources are limited, but we had to do what we had to and mitigate the people’s suffering. The President had to declare a State of National Disaster. Resources had to be diverted to the drought effort. Again the developed countries have convinced us that this is the result of global warming. They even taught us a new word for good measure. They say that this drought is “anthropogenic” meaning that it was caused by humans. But we all know that it is not every human being that caused it. It is them and they got rich in the process. And now we are paying the price.

In any other situation if someone is responsible for causing damage to the other they pay compensation. Why not in this case?

The impact of global warming and climatic hazard is being felt more because of the poor socio-economic condition of our region. This makes the region very vulnerable. But despite that we have no capacity to “hug trees” as most of our rural folks use firewood for cooking. At our current rate, we will be doing that for a long time to come.

Don’t the industrialised nations owe the so-called third world a duty to support the development of different fuels suitable for those of our people still relying on forests?

This moral question is justified by the amount of money which we divert from development towards alleviating the effects of these nations’ anthropogenic activity?

While we are told that global warming has reached critical stages and going by the soaring temperatures, floods, droughts and snow in places where there should be none, this looks dire.

But for nations like ours, environmental friendliness can never be a top priority while we are struggling with providing the basics. Add that to the fact that our emissions are still nowhere near those of merging economies like China and India let alone those who are more developed. To be fair we probably emit a bit more from the many cars in Harare as it appears driving different cars is our main economic activity.

Somebody wrote that there is only a cluster of nations that hold the thermostat to control the climate of our planet. That is developed nations and the emerging economies. The only problem is they have capacity to buffer themselves from the effect and we don’t. There is a clear moral hazard here.

Industrialised nations should not only curtail their own emissions, but should also pay compensation to those countries that are suffering devastating droughts as a result of their past and current environmental transgressions. These countries have been emitting the so-called greenhouse gasses in large quantities since the 19th century when the only carbon we were emitting was smoke from firewood. We cannot shoulder the same level of responsibility.

This is why the Kyoto Agreement came up with the principle of “common, but differentiated responsibility”, but one can argue that those countries which are suffering from devastating droughts have a moral argument to ask those that caused it in the first place to stand up and be counted in alleviating its effect on others.

Industrialised countries developed their nations without restraint. Now countries like Zimbabwe which used to experience droughts in cycles of once a decade are experiencing them more frequently and since these are not natural disasters those culpable should recompense. Our poor countries did not bring this ecological crisis, but they bear the brunt of it. You don’t see so much smog in Harare as you see in many cities of developed countries.

Asking the developed nations to redress every attributable disaster such as floods, heatwaves and the like would sound unrealistic. A starting point is drought relief. Not as charity, but a moral obligation. When crops fail, people lose real money. Inputs normally take one’s life-savings and when their crop fails they are left with nothing. Imagine if someone was to go to that poor old folk and tell them that they have lost everything because of the lifestyles of some rich people elsewhere? Wouldn’t they want a redress? It is the self-interest of the developed nations that has brought an environmental doom to our planet. They should now support clean technology. When their citizens are made to pay “carbon taxes” much of it should be going towards developing alternative clean cooking fuel for the households in rural Africa and Asia.

While this type of compensation is not directly attributable like drought relief, it is contributory. They have to pay for adaptation. This pertains to the funds that are needed for people to adapt from environmentally damaging ways of getting domestic fuels in rural areas. Setting up a fund for eco-friendly cooking fuel research suitable for different social settings is the way to go. Again this should be obligatory and not as some Mother Theresa do-gooder effort.

Developing countries are struggling to fight poverty because of the frequency with which they are experiencing anthropogenic disasters. The environment has become hostile if not near impossible to focus on development with the gravity of experienced disasters.

This itself is a way of carbon trading or “carbon-offsetting”.

Those who have had the “privilege” of sitting in a rural kitchen when the firewood cooking is taking place understand the challenge that a smoke filled hut can pose. But it is not only about that. The efforts and the number of trees that have to fall weekly for a family to provide a warm meal every day is no longer sustainable. Innovation is certainly needed.

Droughts that are being experienced by countries like Zimbabwe should be underwritten by those causing them.

The scientific argument has been put to bed.

Global warming is human caused. Now those countries which have resources which for all intents and purpose are directly from causing havoc on the planet have a moral duty to bankroll the collateral damage they have created.