Due to the drastic change in climate, most people suffer from certain air borne diseases such as catarrh and cough. For close to two months, inhabitants of the capital city have been observing drastic climatic changes. After passing through cold weather conditions, the weather in Yaounde now is extremely hot. Due to the drastic change in climate, most people suffer from certain air borne diseases such as catarrh, cough, etc.

The pollution of rivers, lakes and acquifers from domestic and industrial wastewater discharges, mining runoff, agro-chemicals and other sources is now a growing threat to water resources in most countries in southern Africa. According to a new report titled "Water Quality Management and Pollution Control" in Southern Africa compiled by Prof Ngonidzashe Moyo, a freshwater biologist at the University of Limpopo in South Africa, and Sibekhile Mtetwa and other water resources development experts, the quality of water supplies in the Sadc region, once taken for granted, is becoming the focus of increasing concern.

The cholera epidemic which has been plaguing Angola for nearly a year has placed the spotlight on the continuing lack of safe drinking water in that country. Over the past 11 months, the illness has spread to 16 of the 18 provinces and claimed the lives of more than 2,440 people, according to official estimates. But health workers in the country say the figure is probably much higher as many cases are not reported.

The Namibian government has adopted all the right policies to achieve the United Nations Millennium Development Goal Seven on sustainable environmental practices, but its good intentions have floundered at the implementation stage. According to the director of environment at the ministry of environment and tourism (MET), Theofilus Nghitila, the country ‘‘has been doing a lot to set up the appropriate policies and regulations conducive to sustainable environmental development. It has the right policies and continues to reform policies to stay abreast in a changing world’’.

A leading candidate in Nigeria's upcoming presidential elections has attacked the country's foreign-dominated oil industry for fuelling corruption in the country. "Corruption has been worse with oil because oil has brought more money," said the former Nigerian military strongman General Muhammadu Buhari, who is running a presidential campaign based on an anti-corruption platform.

Unjust land distribution is a legacy of colonial policies that took resources away from indigenous groups. At independence, many states had a minority of white settlers owning large commercial farms while the indigenous majority were left with small plots of land. Land redistribution has been a policy of many governments.

The sustainability of pastoral systems largely depends on a balancing act between pastures, livestock and people. The mobility of pastoralists and their livestock is also a key factor. With climate change, the authors of this article speculate that this balance will be undermined. Greater herd mobility and diversification of pastoralists livelihoods will be required although diversification out of livestock production may be constrained by the environmental characteristics of most pastoral areas in Africa.

Doreen Lwanga responds to a review of Blood Diamonds by Del Hornbuckle and contextualises the role of the RUF in the Sierra Leone civil war.

Del Hornbuckle’s recent review of Blood Diamond, “Blood Diamond…TIA (This is Africa)” in Pambazuka News 287 (2007-01-17)() offered me an inside look at the film without having to give my money to Hollywood. My reason for boycotting Hollywood movies on Africa was due to their deliberate refusal to get the story right and preferring sensational exaggerations and faces of miserable and chaotic Africa in need of a “white humanitarian”. The last Hollywood movie on Africa I watched was “Black Hawk Dawn”, expecting to see the gallant Somalis taking down the US military invaders. Instead, I was bombarded by pictures of Somalis handing roses to US marine saviours on the streets of Mogadishu. What part of Mogadishu was that? Ironically, many on the African continent anxiously await such movies (including the acclaimed Last King of Scotland) even when they depict Africans as brutal and bloodthirsty cannibals.

Back to Blood Diamonds. Although I learned a lot from Ms Hornbuckle’s film review, I was not convinced by the equation drawn (seemingly from the film), that is, the RUF war was about child soldiers and blood diamonds. It is easy for Hollywood to accuse the RUF of accelerating the war through illegal diamond mining and using child soldiers without putting all the facts together. For one, why was a movie based on events that occurred in Sierra Leone shot in Mozambique, a country in Southern Africa with no regional context? Remember that the Sierra Leone civil war involved regional players in Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Liberia and Nigeria. This reductionism of the Sierra Leone conflict to a “RUF problem” of greed, violence and conflict reminds me of Robert Kaplan’s thesis entitled “The Coming Anarchy” published in The Atlantic Monthly of February 1994. Kaplan claimed that scarcity of resources, crime, overpopulation, tribalism, and disease in Africa where rapidly destroying the social fabric of our planet. His essay was so influential that the US State Department faxed copies to all of its Embassies around Africa, undoubtedly shaping its Africa policy.

Fortunately for us, whose attention to context and historical understanding of events does not wither away, along came Paul Richards’ 1996 book ‘Fighting for the Rainforest: War, Youth & Resources in Sierra Leone’. Richards dedicated this book to critiquing the New Barbarism thesis espoused by the likes of Kaplan. He analysed the Sierra Leone civil war as deeply rooted in the troubled history of resource exploitation, involving slave trade, timber, ivory, and valuable mineral resource exploitation. Through dedicated scholarship and long-term residence in Sierra Leone, Richards conducted interviews with child soldiers, ex-combatants, youth, diamond traders, RUF members, government forces, village leaders and residents in mining areas and other regions with RUF incursions in Sierra Leone. Thus, he successfully contextualises the RUF struggle as a revolt against the patrimonial rule of Sierra Leone and marginalization of ordinary people rather than one driven by greedy and trigger happy illiterate people.

It is also true that RUF cut off people’s limbs but not necessarily as alleged by Ms Hornbuckle that, “the less desirables, one-by-one, have limbs chopped off when they’re not useful as child soldiers or mine workers.” RUF cut off limbs to stop people from going into fields for the harvest and to stop hands from voting in the elections of February 1996 (Richards, op cit. xx). However, RUF also had a disciplined and non-materialistic way of life, which involved sharing looted food and medical supplies to all recruits and punishing anyone who looted for personal wealth. According to Richards, RUF was a group of “excluded educated elites”, a product of intellectual anger making rhetorical point deeply rooted in the troubled history of resource extraction (pp. 25-27).

The RUF war in Sierra Leone included several professionals and school dropouts who joined as a protest against the socio-economic marginalization and corruption of the ruling government in the distribution of national resources. Schoolteachers who joined the RUF sought to avenge against the ruling government’s failure to pay their salaries while school-going youngsters in the diamond districts of eastern and southern Sierra Leone saw no future with schools broken down long before the RUF arrived (Richards, Chapter Four). Even conscripts terrorized in the process of capture, later discovered that RUF political analysis addressed their sense of exclusion and the rebels often treated them generously (Richards, p. xix; 53). Richards tells of girls who had never owned decent shoes, being offered a choice of shoes and dresses by the rebels. Others had a chance to resume their education, and received a good basic training in the arts of bush warfare (pp. 28-29).

Since I didn’t see the film myself, I am relying on Ms Hornbuckle’s account that leaves out the political economy context in which RUF incursion took place in Sierra Leone. That is, the patrimonial state benefited from blood diamonds and distributed national resources to political constituencies, thus accelerating social marginalisation, fuelling social grievances and the emergence of the RUF guerrilla movement. For instance, in exchange for security, the National Provisional Ruling Council (NPRC) granted huge mining concessions in Kono district to the South African private security company, Executive Outcomes (p.17). The RUF joined the control of some mineral deposits and diamond resources as a means of obtaining basic subsistence and military equipment. Whereas the patrimonial government collected revenue for personal consumption from trade in diamonds with licensed dealers (mainly Lebanese), the RUF as an outlawed non-state entity could not legally trade in its diamonds. The act of criminalizing the activities of ordinary diamond traders in resource-rich communities denies them an income for school fees and family survival. Previously, communities in resource-rich areas of Eastern Congo, DRC have spoken out against international sanctions and boycott campaigns that criminalize their non-licensed batter trade in their minerals. This is perhaps what President Nelson Mandela meant to re-echo.

No doubt that the atrocities committed by the RUF undermined their campaign. They failed to take their protest to the central government in Freetown and mostly hurt those people sharing similar grievances against the ruling government – the rural population. However, the usual story Hollywood enjoys telling about Africa is a decontextualised one involving the evil (RUF represented by Captain Poison), the disposable (Solomon Vandy) and the saviour (a white journalist Maddy Bowen). Paul Richards book is a must read for everyone because it excels in giving a human face to rebels and guerrilla fighters, as members of a frustrated society, something continuously diminishing with our fascination with the growing global terrorism outlook.

* Doreen Lwanga is an Africa Scholar, Researcher and Activist working in the areas of African security, Pan-Africanism and Higher education in Africa. In 1993, Robert Kaplan, a US journalist wrote a book on the Balkan conflict and later expended his argument to African events in Liberia, Rwanda, Somalia and Sierra Leone in an influential essay in the Atlantic Monthly, February 1994. This essay was a reading for my graduate class in the US on Humanitarian Assistance. Paul Richards also sought to challenge the “Resource Curse” thesis advanced by World Bank economist Paul Colliers and others. Paul Richards (1996): Fighting for the Rain Forest: War, Youth & Resources in Sierra Leone. Oxford: James Currey

* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Duncan Otieno, 22, lives in Huruma, one of four main slums in Kenya's capital, Nairobi. Otieno has lived there since coming to the city in 2003 after finishing school in Kisumu, in the west of the country. Four years on, he remains unemployed except for the odd construction job, which helps him pay the rent of his one-roomed house and support his younger brother.

UWA-FACE Foundation’s tree planting project in Mount Elgon National Park, Uganda, by Chris Lang and Timothy Byakola, documents human rights abuses at Mount Elgon National Park in east Uganda, where the Dutch FACE Foundation has been planting carbon ‘offset’ trees since 1994.

George Wenda from Kenya talks about the plight inflicted on rural people in his country by foreign TNCs who land grab.

The plight of about 3000 indigenous Kenyans, on the verge of losing their land has come to the fore at the Kenyan WSF.

They claim that they are fast losing their means of survival to internal displacement by American investors. The investors under the Dominion group of companies are reported to have bought off a bigger part of the Yala area of Siala district, west off Kenya, where the people live and earn their bread through farming. The citizens’ economic mainstay is agriculture and fishing, and the successful sale of the land could spell doom for the activities through denial of access to the land for cultivation and the river for fishing.

These facts came to light when a participant in the on-going World Social Forum expressed dismay at the way the Kenyan government was allegedly handling foreign investment issue in the country. Rapudo Hawl a community mobiliser in the ‘Friends of Yala Swamp’ told African Flame that the investors had taken the land and set up a plant for rice growing in Yala river, the district source of Fish farming, without any proper compensation to the dwellers. He alleged that because of the dam built for the activity, the villagers now have to migrate from their homes to other places such as churches or trees whenever it rains as the water in the dam overflows into their homes.

“This is the second year since the government gave them the authority to take the land and government can’t do much about the situation because the politicians have been compromised and they made sure they signed the treaty to pass a law on investment” claimed Hawl. “It has affected their livelihoods because they have been depending on agriculture and fishing, and the company can’t allow them to go near the river or they will be arrested.” He added that the people who did not heed the prohibition order had in the past been arrested and taken to court. He however stated that his organisation was working towards lobbying government to revisit the decision, saying a survey was being conducted to obtain facts about the consequences of the investment decision on the indigenous people. “The survey was done in October and is ready but is not yet in circulation. We need to lobby government because they say there is no evidence to our claims” he added.

* Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

African countries are spearheading ways to tackle climate change and have important lessons for how others can cope in future, says a soon to be released report. The report by the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) at Columbia University, United States, shows how certain countries are integrating climate information into development and planning. This helps them to manage climate risks such as flood and drought, reports SciDev.

Kumasi, with a population of one million, is the second city of Ghana and the capital of the Ashanti Region. The city is growing rapidly both in area and population. This is affecting the natural environment and the livelihoods of the people living in rural areas around the city.

Many people in Africa do not have the security of formal titles to land. Policymakers can learn from the various approaches that different countries have taken to improve land tenure security. Land tenure systems reflect the influence of history, culture, population growth, urbanisation and contemporary politics. Research from the International Institute for Environment and Development in the UK examines current trends in land tenure and sources of insecurity. Using seven case studies, the paper describes new approaches to securing tenure rights in Africa.

This report discusses the evolution of the concept of a river basin in order to give a more politicised view of integrated water management. The paper argues that the river basin has been associated with various strands of thinking and sometimes co-opted or mobilised by particular groups to strengthen the legitimacy of their agenda. The author argues that the river basin is a political and ideological construct where the environment and political/administrative systems meet.

Zimbabwe's biggest sewage plant has broken down, sending tonnes of raw effluent into a major river and polluting the water supply of the capital, Harare, city authorities said on Monday (15 January 2007).

The call for land invasions in Hout Bay by the Congress of South African Trade Union's (Cosatu) Western Cape secretary, Tony Ehrenreich, is irresponsible, illegal and a red flag to investors, Democratic Alliance (DA) leader Tony Leon said on Monday (15 January 2007).

About 40 San Bushmen have returned to their ancestral homeland in Botswana following a court ruling that found they were wrongly evicted by the government and could return, a statement said on Tuesday (16 January 2007).

President Olusegun Obasanjo has attributed Africa's environmental problems to activities of other nations, saying, "Many African nations did not contribute to environmental degradation through emissions but suffered debilitating implications due to the activities of other nations."