Prime
My partner brought home an interesting gift; a fan!
Raymond Mujuni
What you need to know:
Uganda was naturally blessed with good weather and had for a considerable amount of time an unending supply of the factors for the production of rain key among them being a healthy distribution of forests on its land.
When she parked infront of the house and called out my name, I knew for a fact that something in the car my partner was driving, required lifting.
So I flipped open the back door and behold was a new house gift, a revolving motor-driven fan. Fans, generally are great for cooling the air and returning heat levels in the house to agreeable and cloth-wearing levels.
My partner has grown uncomfortable with the Kampala heat wave – as many of us have.
It used to be that March was part of the months we counted in the rainy season – February too – but the only rains we have seen are a drizzle too little and altogether non-existent. In the stead, rather than a breeze of cool air, we are now wrapped in hot and humid conditions. Walking the city streets is a sweat-drenching exercise, worse if you have to do it in a suit or heavy cotton in which a lot of clothes are woven for this aisle of the continent. I shudder to imagine what this means for farmers who depend on the seasons to determine what food will be on their plate.
A lot of this heat problem is self-inflicted. Uganda was naturally blessed with good weather and had for a considerable amount of time an unending supply of the factors for the production of rain key among them being a healthy distribution of forests on its land. However, in three decades, we’ve cut through 16 percent of the existing forest cover and reduced to just 8 percent of the existing land mass occupation.
If you scratch the surface, the biggest reason for deforestation has been the rapid growth in population which, itself is caused by a decadent state of education. Uganda’s decision makers know that highly educated women tend to have less children and thus exert less pressure on existing human resources but they choose to duck that debate, they also know that the expansion of communities exerts untellable pressure on natural resources like forests and swamps but for that they’d rather send warning tweets and issue cautionary tales.
So we are now at this place where; “what comes, comes”. If the rain pours, we embrace it, and if it sends hot suns our way, we buy stronger fans to remain clothed in our homes.
The disaster of climate change is likely to push Ugandan communities into competition for scarce resources to be able to produce basic food for home consumption – in other jurisdictions where this happened like Eurasia, the disaster of climatic conditions similar to the ones we have led to the innovation of deadly weapons and intermittent wars.
If anyone ‘in things’ is reading this column, please act to save me from another fan as a valentines gift in the coming year.
The author is a journalist
