MANY CLIMATES TO CHANGE

There are several human ‘climates’ that need change, writes Okello Oculi

On October 1, 2021, a television news item on Las Palmas volcano showed two new red hot pillars of lava shooting upwards: evoking from an observer that ‘’nature is angry with us humans’.’ Owners of the 900 houses destroyed by a combination of flowing lava and tremors from unceasing eruptions may be of such ruminations.

The over 10,000 angry youths assembled in Milan to mock ‘’Blah Blah Blah” pledges by leaders of countries whose factories out compete the volcano on Canary Island in shooting Carbon Dioxide into global skies probably cheered the wrath by nature. Its call for humanity to change the climate of their industrial economic greed, was probably not noticed by the young protestors.

· Among the anti-Climate Change campaigners were those from African countries where village communities have not harvested millet, maize, sorghum due to dry soils preventing sowing, weeding and harvesting cycles. Growing protein-yielding beans and groundnuts wilted from lack of rain and blazing tropical sun.

· A delegate from Kenya lamented the decimation of cattle, sheep, goats and poultry from lack of fodder and water to drink. Women are graduating from sharing drinking water with domestic animals and animals in the wild, to trekking long distances to collect muddy water from few holes in the ground. These are hazards not captured in the statistic of 3 per cent of Carbon Dioxide rising out of Africa.

· Across East Asia another noxious Talibanised climate is driving brave women of Afghanistan into angry protests. The new ‘Emirate’’ is imposing on their fate by driving them out of secondary school and college education, as well as manifesting their talents through work outside their homes.

· Butts of guns and whips wielded by hands of contempt for their human rights bashed at their demands for a new history, or rather, a return to a history of Afghan life and culture before the Mujahedeen and the Taliban imposed their will. Their form of Climate Change was not part of the ‘’Blah Blah Blah’’ being lambasted by the young demonstrators on streets of Milan.

· On trembling official streets of Khartoum and Omdurman (Sudan’s cities on eyelid of a mournful River Nile), angry young women punched fists at political skies and led chants of determination to defend reforms for earning true democratic governance. A rump of soldiers loyal to three decades of Oman Bashir’s ruthless rule had attempted a military coup against a ‘’transitional’’ military-civilian government. Although they had failed, there were fears that politicians had urged them test if angry youths would return to seize streets again.

· Roars of busloads and trainloads of demonstrators from all regions of Sudan’s memory probably failed to reach Milan. The booms of rage in that Italian city almost certainly were not aware that if dictator Omar Bashir ruled over Milan they would have been showered with bullets and rhino-skin whips from his political climate.

· On streets of Bamako (in Mali) and Conakry (in Guinea) exultant youths fuelled by hope that staccato of military guns had killed nightmares of governance by impudent corruption and terrorism against demands for serving the welfare of citizens. President Alfa Conde had wiped muddy feet on a Constitution limiting his appetite for power. Impunity had animated ethnic loyalty among his ethnic community to vote for his crippled third election contest; while violence cast the deciding vote.

· In Bamako fatigue with war against Al Qaeda while foreign troops showed more interest in keeping China from eating from Mali’s uranium, gold and diamond mines than in protecting the people. Political leaders were weakened by corruption, while millions of unemployed youth rumbled with volcanic hope. The sound of impatient military thunderclaps became sounds of redemption.

· These climates of change aroused a peculiar ‘’Blah Blah Blah’’ by African leaders trapped between wishes for building democratic governance and resisting urges to cross borders and punish corrupt and murderous leaders. In failing to lure Conde out of Conakry and fly him to cool his tongue on the Indian Ocean at Zanzibar – as Presidents Obasanjo and Thabo Mbeki had done to Charles Taylor – they lost flares of messiahs at the people of Guinea. They failed to change a putrid climate that was choking Guinea’s African familyhoods.

· Excited crowds welcoming these military coups resembled outbursts of joy when the Police knee-killer of George Floyd was declared guilty on all charges of crime. Subsequent incidences of French police habitually beating Black men inside closets; a British policeman hand cupping a woman on a street, later raping her and burning her body inside a wooded area; a French serial rapist, killer of many women and an eleven-year old girl whose body he set on fire, similar police appetites in South Africa and Nigeria, collectively join global shouts for climates of change