Africa News blog
African business, politics and lifestyle
Is Kenya’s drought a climate changing warning?
Successive failed rain seasons in Kenya have led to a drought that experts say is the worst in the country since 1996.
And it is not just a problem for Kenya. Aid agencies estimate more than 23 million people will need food aid in the Horn of Africa region.
Kenyan Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai says it shows how ill-prepared much of Africa is to deal with the effects of climate change.
Herders who depend on cattle for their food and income are having to drive their livestock hundreds of kilometres to seek pasture and water – but find little relief.
“The grass was green when I got here, but it is finished now and a lot of our animals are dying,” Grewan Lesakut, from the pastoralist Samburu community in the Rift Valley, told Reuters Africa Journal.
“The way I see it, all our cows are going to die,” fellow herder John Lenyarui said. “I know some people who had 50 cows but have nothing now, some with 200 and now have only 40 and myself I had 500 and now I have 100.”
Kenya’s Meat Commission is doing what it can. It has offered to buy thousands of cattle from their owners to be slaughtered for meat. But the government facility has been stretched to the limit and thousands of have died outside the slaughterhouse.
Indeed the drought we are experiencing at present in Kenya is quite severe. However, as with many climatic events, it is hard to pin the blame on any single factor. Historically, the region has experienced far more severe droughts in the not too distant future, and these are just a part and parcel of the region’s climate patterns. To start talking about climate change, unfortunately, deviates from the key issue that pushed east Africa way beyond sustainability, which is population. With or without climate change, the population factor, with all its derived variables of crime, poverty, ethnic tension and environmental degradation, has brought the horn of Africa to a cliff edge where we don’t even need climate change to fall over. For that matter, all the policy makers here at home and in the donor community should return population to forefront of priorities if we are to expect at future improvement in people’s livelihoods or in our ability to adapt to climate change.
