Should Africa Continue to Be Treated Like a “Victim” By the World

Is It Time to Stop Treating the Continent As a Victim?

SciDev.Net (London)
OPINION
1 August 2007
Posted to the web 2 August 2007

By Katharine Vincent

It is commonly upheld — at least by the media — that Africa is a frontline victim of climate change.

It is true that at the continental scale Africa may suffer because of it is geographic and economic vulnerability. But branding Africa as a victim does a disservice to the many examples of small-scale resilience and adaptive capacity in evidence throughout the continent.

Furthermore, perpetuating the ‘Africa as victim’ myth runs the risk of deflecting attention away from a systematic investigation into how such resistive measures could be expanded to reduce vulnerability.

A more realistic picture

The year 2007 marked the release of the long-awaited fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which looked at the impact of climate change on different parts of the world and their adaptation and vulnerability to its effects.

The report confirms that Africa is one of the most vulnerable continents and will be exposed to the adverse impacts of climate variability and change. Agricultural productivity is likely to be constrained by water stress and a decrease in the land area suitable for farming — with a reduction in yields of up to 50 per cent predicted for some parts of the continent by 2020.

But the report also highlights evidence that African people are coping with and adapting to climate variability and change. Although it does not indicate whether these responses will be sufficient in practice to deal with the rate and magnitude of projected change, they provide grounds for optimism.

Still, the press response to the report, both internationally and in Africa, has emphasised the vulnerability of the continent over its potential adaptive capacity.

It is important to recognise that there will be adverse effects, but portraying the continent as helpless legitimises a sense of resignation to the fact that climate change will merely contribute to ongoing poverty and leave Africa on an unavoidable downward trajectory.

Groundwork to reduce vulnerability

The outlook need not be so bleak. We should be attempting to understand the complex coping and adaptation strategies that are in operation and to identify where these are working and where they need to be improved.

Researchers investigating coping and adaptive capacity at different levels on the continent — from household efforts to national strategies covering both social and biophysical systems — have compiled a cohort of studies that exemplify emerging generic processes.

Farmers, for example, are flexible in their livelihood choices, which enable them to respond to weather conditions on a year-by-year basis. In a dry year they may seek alternative pasture for their cattle and irrigate their crops. If a drought is long lasting, male members of the household might migrate to the city in search of alternative employment.

Emerging recognition of the bottlenecks constraining effective adaptation has also promoted research into tools that can be used to reduce vulnerability. For example, seasonal climate forecasting enables both commercial and subsistence farmers to respond on an annual basis to anticipated weather conditions.

Farmers in several southern African countries, including South Africa and Zimbabwe, are currently benefiting from improved information on seasonal weather conditions.

Ecologists and social scientists working on the coupling of physical and social systems have highlighted the need for adaptive co-management that recognises the interrelationship between the physical and human environment. A variety of institutions, working at local through to national and regional levels in Africa, are embracing this attitude.

They are taking a more holistic approach to development, to reducing the risk of disasters, and to mitigating and adapting to climate change. This includes provision of national weather services and of a growing number of disaster-management agencies, which are being set up following the introduction of national disaster-management policies and plans.

Confronting the situation

Faced with the media’s despair, we can hardly blame African policy-makers for feeling helpless against climate change and for not believing that adaptation can be achieved. As a result, policies focusing on national climate change are scant and weak where they do exist, although the issues are recognised to varying degrees in formulating policy in related spheres, such as water supply, agriculture and disaster management.

Taking a more proactive approach to adaptation — recognising the continent’s strengths and identifying weaknesses and obstacles in the way of achieving it — is a much more constructive response to the IPCC’s fourth assessment report.

It is one that should encourage Africans to seek the most effective means of help from themselves and others, thereby ensuring that vulnerability in the face of future climate change is reduced.

Katharine Vincent is a postdoctoral researcher with the ReVAMP research group at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and a contributing author to the IPCC fourth assessment report.

45 Years Later… have African Leaders Failed Test of Unity

45 Years On, Leaders Failed Test of Unity

East African Standard (Nairobi)
NEWS
1 August 2007
Posted to the web 31 July 2007

By Kisemei Mutisya
Nairobi
The search for African unity is not only an emotional issue, but also a divisive subject.

While some zealously support the formation of the United States of Africa, others vehemently oppose it. Divisions at the ninth African Union summit in Ghana are a replay of the war of nerves between the Nkurumahists and gradualists in the 1960s during the days of the Organisation of African Unity, the predecessor of the African Union.

From its Diaspora roots, Pan-Africanism was a revolutionary, anti-imperial and anti-capitalist movement that proclaimed social democracy. Its proponents welcomed economic democracy as the only empowering philosophy since the 1945 Manchester conference.

No sooner had Pan-Africanism left its Diaspora roots to its organic soil in Africa than sharp differences begin to manifest themselves at the top leadership of the newly decolonised and decolonising States. Ghana’s founding President Kwame Nkrumah passionately argued that artificial divisions and territorial boundaries the imperialists created were deliberate steps to obstruct political unity and would expose Africa to neo-colonial manipulation.

Nkrumah cautioned that sovereignty, State power and flags would be too sweet to surrender. But the gradualists warned that Africa was not ready for political union and cited regional integration as the best way of realising African unity. To be sure, the Nigerian delegation in the 1960s argued that their country would never surrender her sovereignty for the sake of African unity.

The differences between Nkrumah’s position and those who counselled caution became chronic at every OAU summit, culminating in a compromise that saw gradualism institutionalised and inscribed in the OAU Charter. But this was not before Nkrumah earned himself several enemies among fellow Heads of State. History repeated itself in Accra last month when African Heads of State refused to learn from history.

Libya’s Muammar Gadaffi and Senegal’s Abdoulaye Wade’s position is similar to Nkrumah’s and Sekoh Toure’s in the 1960s. Toure and Nkrumah had argued that regional groups would make it even harder or impossible to realise continental unity. From his experience in West Africa, he knew that regional blocs retard rather than promote unification.

Deliberate political will is needed to transcend neo-colonial trappings and class interests. Nkrumah’s observation and Tanzania’s founding President Julius Nyerere’s admission during Ghana’s 50th independence celebration in 1997 that African Heads of States failed to realise the objectives of African unity. While noting partial success in liberating the continent, African leaders had failed to unite the continent.

Nkrumah argued that colonial economies competed with one another and were not compatible – just like post-colonial economies exhibit uneven development. Furthermore, each State seeks to associate with metropolitan economies on terms and conditions that favour and advance national interests. This has led to perpetual acrimony and irreconcilable contradictions prevalent in regional institutions such as South African Development Community, East African Community (EAC) and Ecowas.

The continent should learn from EAC. Its golden age was when the region had a single political entity, the colonial State, which integrated the economies of East Africa. The post-colonial State, while seeking to maximise advantage of the EAC, led to disintegration in 1977.

The African Union summit in Ghana met when Nkrumah had been proved right beyond reasonable doubt. State nationalism and neo-colonial manipulation have led to Africa’s first world war in the Great Lakes region, Ethiopia-Eritrea conflict, war in Somalia, civil war in Darfur, low-intensity conflict in Lesotho, grand corruption in East Africa, pillage of national resources and rise of regional hegemonies.

The post-colonial State is experiencing the hand of neo-colonial institutions: The IMF, World Bank and World Trade Organisation have a grip on African economies. In the 1980s, Africa lost self-determination after it abandoned the Lagos Plan of Action in favour of World Bank recommendations.

More recently, the post-colonial State has combined Structural Adjustment Programmes with the neo-liberal poverty reduction strategy papers. Conservative African leaders who wine and dine with G8 leaders have betrayed the Pan-African dream even as they fail to construct a single kiosk.

Globalisation has opened another battlefront. It has undermined the welfare of African people through privatisation, liberalisation and delinking of the State from the economy. Through this, it has abandoned its role in favour of the markets.

The rise of regional hegemonies and lack of initiative have brought this sorry state. In Ghana, South African President Thabo Mbeki and Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni were united in opposing Gadaffi and Wade’s ideas on flimsy grounds of gradualism. The status quo works for Mbeki’s comprador interests in Africa and South Africa’s national interest to keep the captive market it enjoys.

The same is true for Nigeria and Kenya. Pan-Africanism should regain the lost initiative through citizens, scholars and institutions. The most important lesson from Accra is that gradualism is an imperial thinking that has brought Africa to its knees.

Mbeki, Museveni and others should know Africa is more important than their national interests.

The writer is a lecturer at Catholic University of Eastern Africa