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This is the Uganda a grandchild could find in 2050. Unless…
Mr Charles Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”.
What you need to know:
Is it possible to take these difficult and unpopular actions and maintain even the current pretence of semi-democratic/elected government?
Two good Ugandan stories could soon die painful deaths. One is about the increase in wealth – or the decrease in extreme poverty. The other is coffee. Your unborn grandchild might not know that these lands ever produced coffee. Next week, the Africa Climate Summit kicks off in Nairobi. Ugandan delegates could make their way a short distance from the Kenyatta International Convention Centre, where the climate summit is being held, to CJ’s, the hottest café chain in Nairobi of recent years, on Koinange Street. CJ’s is owned by our own Ahmed Omar Mandela, perhaps East Africa’s most successful low-key entrepreneur. Mandela has opened a series of popular CJ’s outlets in Nairobi, but his most ambitious is coming up in the frenetic Eastleigh suburb at the new BBS Mall. The mall is far out the largest in East and Central Africa. A bird told me that Mandela hired designers from Istanbul, who have been closed inside there, producing what could be the “most unforgettable restaurant interior” we will see. With Mandela’s record, that is probably not hot air.
CJ’s cooks up great coffees. So, as our delegates drink of it, they should contemplate the nightmare: soon, Uganda and coffee will not be mentioned in the same sentence. This story is told in a short 2020 World Bank report, “The Adaptation Principles: A Guide for Designing Strategies for Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience”, which laid out “six universal principles to help policymakers plan for adaptation.” It opens with an account of what Uganda could lose in the climate change fires:
“Over the past decades, Uganda made remarkable progress in reducing poverty and boosting socio-economic development. In 1992, some 56 percent of the population was living in poverty. By 2016, that figure had fallen to 21 percent. Yet, the global economic ramifications of the Covid-19 pandemic and the effects of climate change are forcing the country to confront new challenges: shocks not only threaten further progress but can reverse hard won successes of the past.
“Around 72 percent of Uganda’s labour force works in agriculture – a sector that is highly climate sensitive. Take coffee: Uganda is Africa’s second largest exporter of coffee [naye, it’s the continent’s largest exporter of coffee - COO]. Over 17 percent of Uganda’s exports coming from just this high-value crop. Recent droughts, however, are estimated to have destroyed half of all coffee yields. In the coming decades, changing climatic conditions are expected to pose profound challenges to Uganda’s coffee sector: without adaptive measures, only 1 percent of Uganda’s current coffee producing land is expected to be able to continue production. And coffee is just one sector that could face mounting impacts from climate change: around 2.3 million poor people in Uganda also face high levels of flood risk”. By 2050, when there will be 100 million Ugandans packed in this small country, if your child who was born this year gets married at 26 in 2049, and the couple get a child in 2050, by the time she goes to kindergarten in 2057, she will be taught about Ugandan coffee the same way children learn about sisal today.
As the report suggested, in Uganda’s case, climate change is likely to hammer us differently than, say, Kenya. Most of Kenya will be hot and in perpetual drought. Uganda will be plagued by both drought and floods. Chunks of current farmland will be under water, so we won’t be able to farm or raise cattle on it.
There are a thousand things that need to be done. The invasion of the wetlands must stop. The attack on forests need to end. The pollution of waters must be stopped and the rivers and lakes healed. We must move away from dependence on charcoal to clean energy, and connect nearly seven million Ugandan homesteads to the electricity grid. There’s a part of me that these days is terrified about the political meaning of this. Is it possible to take these difficult and unpopular actions and maintain even the current pretence of semi-democratic/elected government? The answers are so uncomfortable, they sent me desperately seizing on the least painful of the things we can do in the fight against climate change - land reform. Specifically, dramatically expand titled land ownership. People will always nurture the land they own into good health.
A friend in northern Uganda bought a large barren piece of land. Everyone laughed at him; that he was an educated fool who had been taken for a ride. He dug water traps, mulched it, planted shrubs and grass, and threw a lot of organic garbage on it. Today if you stand on top of the abutting hill, it is the densest green farm for as far as the eyes can see. Now they envy him. We need at least 2.5 million Ugandans like him.
Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. Twitter@cobbo3
