Danse Macabre

Danse Macabre

Africa waits on pins and needles as America plays with the world. It’s not true that a default will in any way help Africa, not even gold-producing South Africa.

It’s hard to imagine what a default will be, and I don’t mean that in any apocalyptic way. America is the standard for world economy. It could be that default will be ignored, because if default of the standard is not ignored, the whole box of cards resting on it is jeopardized.

Gold is soaring, and the world’s principal gold source is South Africa, the continent’s most important economic power.

South Africa moved from the 32nd to the 28th largest economy just in a year, last year, because of the soaring price of gold. That’s an extremely respectable position relative to the rest of the world, and for certain, the leader in the continent. (Egypt is number 2 on the continent, 40th in the world.)

You would think South Africans would be ho-humming the imminent American default.

“Despite the benefits for mining, the timing could not be worse for the SA economy, “ writes Claire Bisseker last week in Johannesburg’s most important financial newspaper, the Financial Mail.

Bisseker’s brilliant synopsis of our situation and what it means for Africa is required reading for anyone interested in the economies there. What I found particularly interesting is that she extends her view well beyond the current crisis and in the long-term actually sees a benefit for African and other emerging economies.

“Whatever happens, one thing is clear… [There will be a] shift to fast-growing emerging markets as the main source of global dynamism.”

In other words, a benefit – a silver lining if you will – to emerging economies. If she’s right, it’s a terribly ironic silver lining to a world based once based gold and now thought to be based on … us, America.

But in the short-term, everyone in Africa warns the jolt will be significant.

In today’s lead editorial, the Mail’s editor, Barney Mthombothi asks, “As the world watches the danse macabre in Washington DC with utter amazement and dread, one has to ask: who runs the place? Have America’s leaders taken leave of their senses? And are we witnessing the decline of a once great power?”

Mthombothi dares to suggest one reason for the impasse is American racism.

“So why an impasse now? Some believe it has a lot to do with Obama, his colour to be exact.” Although he then suggests an equally important component is America’s “ideological divide.”

Like all African business leaders, Mthombothi must harbor a long bitterness that stretches all the way back to the days of slavery. And when giant places like Texas try to reword if not rewrite the history of slavery, it only stings them more.

In the end, like many dispatches I’ve been reading from Africa, Mthombothi concludes that the fundamental problem is not racism or ideological divide, but our constitution.

“The American constitution was an arrangement for a bygone era. It’s led to a stalemate that threatens us all.”

I tend to agree, although it may not be so much the constitution as the belief that we can neither reinterpret or change it to fit our modern times. The intransigence of the American right is the too old ebony stick that’s either going to break in the wind or come down on us all.

Calling the South Sudan Corrupt

Calling the South Sudan Corrupt

I am sick of westerners criticizing corruption in Africa, and recent reports from Africa’s 54th country, the new South Sudan, reveal how hypocritical, racist and just plain unfair corruption charges against Africa often are.

The new South Sudan is suddenly rich by most African standards, because of its ownership – yet to be fully defined – of Sudan’s rich oil fields. And temporarily, at least, it’s enjoying huge amounts of western aid to get itself going. So there’s a lot of cash, and there’s been a lot of cash for several years.

There are two main reasons that criticizing Africa for corruption is so wrong. First, the donor encourages corruption. Second, the donor is corrupt.

Giving money without strict accountability is lunacy, yet that is what most of the donor group in the South Sudan is doing, including the U.S. It has led to some nearly laughable acts of corruption. When a dirt poor economy is suddenly flooded with nonspecific money, expect the slime to start skimming.

Only Canada, among all the donor nations, has retained the foresight to insist on its aid going directly to the projects for which it was allocated. All other western countries, including the U.S., send cash – however specified – through the new government.

So Canada alone can obtain relatively good accountability of its aid.

The tradition of foreign aid being allocated for specific projects – like water treatment, for instance – but then being given to the recipient country rather than its water works directly, has a long history. Part of it is simplicity.

The U.S. gives South Sudan about $300 million every year, and the largest portion of this is composed of specific development projects. Last year, for example, there were dozens of specific projects mentioned in the aid grant.

To send this as smaller pieces to each of the projects is tedious. It also requires much more oversight, as Canada now does, as it more carefully evaluates each and every project. This is ideally the way to go, but that would take a greater staff in USAid than the U.S. Congress is willing to fund.

So while conservatives in Congress decry foreign aid for being corrupt, they are exactly the ones who make it so.

It would be much better to reduce the aid – as Canada has done – but insist on the separate project funding and accountability by using what was reduced to fund additional Canadian staff to oversee the funding.

Brilliant, but in America ideologically impossible. Can you imagine any reason – even if it saves money – that Congress would accept to increase the federal workforce?

Even worse, can you imagine the battles in Congress over whether to fund this water treatment plant in Juba, because corruption was discovered there, or oil field catering services further north, because Haliburton is involved?

For both the structural and ideological reasons that restrain America’s way of giving aid, most all of the donor countries behave similarly.

“O Canada, we stand on guard for thee!”

Second.

Corruption is a learned behavior. It happens to be remarkably anathema to virtually all subsistence economies and traditional societies. It is a modern, capitalistic phenomenon.

You’ve heard of Macmillan Publishers, haven’t you? Massive publishing company. Revenues mostly from school text books.

Monday, Macmillan agreed in a UK court that it had bribed (massively) South Sudan officials to get the country’s school text book market.

It would have been a lucrative deal. Donor nations had given the World Bank nearly $50 million to develop educational materials for the new nation, and Macmillan was bidding on the contract. Macmillan is now barred from working with donor agencies for … three years.

Three years?!! So, you mean, after three years they can bribe some more?

This stalwart of America academia is also under investigation, now, for its similar contracts in Rwanda, Uganda and Zambia, not your cleanest of countries.

Example Two.

East Africa’s aggressive blogger, Mark Jordahl, recently reported several corrupt land grabs occurring in the South Sudan, all instigated by donor nation companies.

In the brilliant blog,“South Sudan – a Subsidiary of Texas“, Jordahl reports how an American company bought a hunk of The Sudan equal in size to the state of Delaware for a questionable payment to a possibly fictitious cooperative of ….

…$25,000. About a penny an acre.

The company, well, it isn’t even a company. It’s a hedge fund without a website. And it now owns a 49-year lease on land in the South Sudan equal in size to the state in which it is legally incorporated.

Not a lot of corruption money, you say? No, it isn’t. And it all went to a fictitious cooperative of bribed Southern Sudanese who agreed to a revenue split of 60/40 on anything developed there.

Like oil.

These are just two examples, one outright corruption, the other mostly clever theft, begun by the westerners who decry the corruption of Africa.

It’s called calling the kettle black. And, by the way, it’s infectious.

There are legions more South Sudanese who want a corrupt-free society than the criminals who live there. But the west is rewarding criminals while neglecting the honest entrepreneur. Who’s really to blame?

Famine by Man not Drought

Famine by Man not Drought

Famine is spreading across the Horn of Africa and threatens a world crisis. It’s not principally the result of drought. It’s due to political and social circumstances that if left unaddressed will begin one terrible unending famine capable of wiping out entire populations and massively stressing global resources.

News junkies crave disasters and power the news everywhere. The famine reporting I’m reading now is so driven by this that even impeccable organizations like one of my daily necessities, Reuters Africa, are failing to report correctly.

Reuters’ report, today, essentially attributes the main cause for the famine to “successive seasons of failed rains.”

Not true. There has been only one failed rainy season in The Horn so far.

The famine is centered in Somalia, and because of the fighting there, good weather data doesn’t exist. But we do have good weather data very nearby, where nearly 400,000 refugees have fled just over the border into Kenya, at Mandera.

This is in Kenya’s far north in a climate zone nearly identical to most of Somalia. See the “Precipitation MANDERA, KENYA” chart prepared by NOA.

The chart shows that the normal Nov-Dec rainy season received just about 2″ of rain, which is about three-quarters of normal. The usually heavier Mar-May season failed completely. That one rainy season failure would not have caused famine in the past.

Then why is there now a looming crisis?

Because there’s a war. The people in Somalia have been disrupted from their normal routines. Before war ravaged The Horn a single rainy season failure was easily augmented by relying on stored food from surplus harvests, or from importing food from further south.

But now even when the rains are good, such as a year ago, the Somali’s didn’t grow much food. They weren’t planting; they were shooting.

And while there is surplus food in the world, even in the immediate area, it isn’t getting to the famine area. AID agencies can’t give away free food.

And Tanzania, which has a bumper harvest so far this year, has banned free market agricultural sales to the north, for fear it will deplete its own surpluses. This has severely effected the relief effort in Somalia, not to mention angered northern Tanzanian farmers.

So the imminent world crisis in The Horn is most certainly famine. But its principal cause is not the failure of rains, but the failure of humankind.

Moving south into Kenya and Tanzania, we have a slightly different story.

Look at NOA’s charts for NAIROBI and MWANZA.

An imaginary line from Nairobi, Kenya, to Mwanza, Tanzania, more or less transects the most densely populated areas of that region as well as the principal game viewing areas enjoyed by foreign tourists.

Over the course of the last year, Nairobi is running a 47% deficit in normal precipitation, and Mwanza is running a 26% deficit. “Running” is the key word. A careful reading of the graph shows that the problem occurred in the Feb-Jun period. That’s when the top (normal) and bottom (actual) lines diverge. That season failed completely in Nairobi and was weak in Mwanza.

But note that the track from May onwards in Mwanza is normal, and in fact shows more rain than normal in Nairobi.

We know, too, from photos coming from northern Tanzania that there have been recent rains there. It was thunderstorming in some Nairobi areas last night. This is totally abnormal. The end of July is normally a completely dry time.

Normal isn’t normal, anymore. The seasons for rains are changing or growing erratic due to climate change.

Go into a national park, and things look pretty normal. The giraffe, wildebeest, buffalo and zebra look fine. But just outside the park, Maasai cattle are dying.

More and more, the growing numbers of Maasai cattle depend upon hay-like supplements. Farmers who still plant in traditional ways, presuming the rains will come in March (when in fact, this year it appears they are coming, now), lose their crops. There is no hay. Even if there were hay, there are probably too many cattle.

The situation applies to people, too. Food prices increase because less was produced, and those rich enough have no problem, as is the case in most urban areas like Nairobi. But outside urban areas, crises occur almost overnight.

Food prices increase. Poor people have less money. Truck farmers take their food to areas where it can be bought and stop deliveries to remote areas where the poor can’t pay.

Nairobi announced this week that a series of power outages were now planned, because of the “poor rains” last season. The reservoirs are too low to produce enough power. “Enough” is a more important word in that last sentence than “low.”

In years past, enough power was cranked out even after two or three failed rainy seasons. Not now. One failed season and the power goes out.

There is no question that we have an imminent catastrophe in Somalia, a famine that has already begun. There is no question that we have a growing social crisis in much of Kenya.

But neither is due to drought, at least drought as has been historically defined. It’s due to war and the failure to deal with climate change.

It’s a failure of humankind. And any remedy for that may be as unattainable as controlling the weather.

Tick off Malawi

Tick off Malawi

Historically peaceful, extremely little, almost hidden Malawi is blowing up from the inside, rattling and perhaps destroying one of Africa’s last dictators. I’m amazed he doesn’t seem to understand.

Twevolution’s inevitable creep over Africa now covers much of the continent like a jar of syrup spilled over an old flat stone. It stopped and moved around a couple intransigent bulges like the Central African Republic and Zimbabwe, pooled in the great Egyptian depression, slipped over polished parts like Cameroon where its viscosity will determine its effect, and finally has reached little hidden away Malawi.

Wednesday and Thursday protests erupted in all the major Malawian cities, which is four: Mzuzu, Lilongwe, Blantyre and Karonga. After lots of tear gas and live ammunition were used by police, eighteen people were left dead and hundreds wounded.

The 77-year old dictator, Bingu wa Matharika, closed media outlets, continues to detain journalists, has banned funerals and is holding with indefinite charges up to 300 protest leaders.

“Enough is enough,” Bloomberg news quoted him today. “I will smoke you out wherever you are because you have no right to destroy our peace,” Mutharika said. “I have been patient long enough.”

But so have the people, and that’s what I just don’t understand. And here are the distinctions between the people of Malawi, and the people of the Central African Republic (CAR), Zimbabwe and perhaps, Cameroon.

There aren’t a lot of people in the CAR, relative to other African countries. They live in Africa’s deepest jungle, have a very low level of development, and for at least two generations have lived in a state of if not constant war, constant no peace. It’s similar to Yemen or Afghanistan, where very disparate peoples are separated by awesome geography. It’s hard to get enough people for a few tables of bridge.

Zimbabwe was extremely rich relative to other African countries. When the dictator Mugabe slowly extended his control, there was a lot to pass around. There is now a very large section of the people, a minority to be sure but significant, who depend upon him, and they hold what is left of the riches and power. It is hard for a eviscerated majority to wrest control.

Cameroon is more similar to the CAR than Zimbabwe, but it is far more developed than the CAR and has more riches like huge gas fields and some mining. I think that gas is going to explode big time this fall at the election. I think with Cameroon, it’s just a matter of time, and not very long time.

But Malawi is different from them all. Malawi until twevolution was one of the most stable African countries, mainly because of its deft policies during the years of South Africa’s apartheid regime. Malawi was the bridge between South Africa and the rest of Africa, the mediator, the liaison between what ostensibly was an impossible rift.

South Africa’s economy now and before is about twenty times as great as the rest of black Africa, so it is a force no matter how ideologically unappealing it was, that must be reckoned with.

During apartheid the only way you could fly into South Africa, for instance, from Kenya was to connect through Malawi. If Uganda needed grain grown in South Africa, it bought the grain from agriculturally poor Malawi, who bought it from South Africa.

When you used those old land lines to call Johannesburg from Kigali, the last great switch was in Blantyre (Malawi). If you needed to exchange South African Rand that Switzerland wanted to pay you with for a safari in Ethiopia, it would be exchanged in Blantyre.

Malawi prospered during apartheid. South African citizens and businesses could own all sorts of things there, but so could Egyptians and Tanzanians. Malawi and the undesirable Cape Verde Islands were the only two places in this massive continent where South Africans and non South Africans could be seen vacationing together.

So South Africans developed Malawian tourism big time. Lake Malawi, one of the most beautiful deep water lakes in the world, is rimmed with South African mansions and tourist resorts. The relatively densely populated country was cleared out a bit (by South Africans) to create two modest big game reserves.

Malawi grew rich on the ideological divide between South Africa and the rest of the world. And both South Africa and the rest of the world were quite happy that the country was iron-clad stable. It was, and remains, a dictatorship.

South Africa is preparing to celebrate its 20th anniversary freed from apartheid in a few years. Malawi hasn’t done so well the last several decades, relative to the rest of Africa.

Twevolution frees initiative, severs the privileges of those who were born into rule or class from the riches and potentials of the country. Malawi should have made these changes long before twevolution arrived last year. But it didn’t.

Mutharika will not be able to squash this revolution, as Mugabe has in Zimbabwe and Bozize has in the CAR, and as Biya is trying desperately to do in the Cameroon. Mutharika does not have situations like them.

He’ll be gone, soon. Let’s just hope it’s quick and as peaceful as possible.

The Dead Elephant in the Pyre

The Dead Elephant in the Pyre

Protecting wildlife in Africa is a contentious issue, but Wednesday the Kenyan government publicly and forcibly illustrated its commitment to do so. There was no equivocation left in the pile of burned elephant tusks in Tsavo National Park.

It wasn’t just that 5 tonnes of confiscated ivory, worth close to $1 million on the black market, was being burned to ash. It was be being burned to ash by the President of Kenya, Mwai Kibaki.

And standing next to Kibaki were Kenya’s minister for Forestry and Wildlife and Minister for the Environment, as well as Uganda’s Minister for Tourism.

Kenya fought tooth and nail earlier this year at the CITES convention in DOHA to prevent elephant protection from being downlisted internationally. It fought hard against a formidable coalition of southern African countries, spearheaded this time by cousin, Tanzania. Kenya won.

The arguments Kenya had to successfully counter to defeat the initiative more or less all wrapped up into one: enormous revenue can be generated from the sale of ivory. In its most angelic form, this comes strictly from ivory sales by governments to governments of culled or naturally dead elephant, and in its slightly less acceptable form, from the sales of ivory confiscated from criminals.

But Kenya prevailed. Tanzania and its southern African countries are still grumbling.

Public support to loosen the restrictions on elephant protection, however, has numerous explanations. First and foremost is the scientific battle whether there are too many elephants right now. It’s similar to thousands of American communities that consider deer culling.

Many American communities that cull deer champion their subsequent efforts to give the meat to soup kitchens following one sniper’s moderate aim. But what do you do with 15,000 pounds of inedible meat after you;ve had to hire a military battalion to kill a single monster? And then, what do you do with the ivory, whose value is indisputably remarkable?

The next set of arguments is more compelling to the public that lives near elephant who almost universally believe one elephant is too many: Farmers lose tremendous amounts of crops annually to elephant raids, towns and villages suffer building attacks and road destruction, and federal outlays to protect elephants and their sanctuaries are becoming increasingly expensive.

But apparently not so expensive as to challenge the balance of tourist revenues. It’s the economy, stupid. We all applaud President Kibaki and his government for this dramatic show of public support, but … we all know why.

Pull the plug on tourist revenue is to pull the elephant gun trigger. Imagine if a fifth to a quarter of your local town’s property taxes came from foreign tourists paying to see deer or racoons. There’d be a whole different way of looking at planting roses.

I’m uncomfortable with this fact, just as I’m uncomfortable with current American politics driven by the almighty dollar. But … it’s the economy, stupid. Yet by pushing this moral and ethical if even scientific argument down the road, it pushes an ultimate understanding of it to the edge of the cliff.

Leakey may be exactly right that we are in the 6th great die-off, and that species decline is way behind our ability to control. But we know that species decline is fundamentally bad. And we know that no species declines all by itself, it drags much of its ecosystem and related species right down the drain with it. So governing this moral if academic argument by current economics is childish, way too short sighted.

And even more pressing is constructing the right now balance between the stresses of protecting the species and the negative human ramifications of doing so.

We need to right now figure out ways to protect farmers who live near game parks. Southern Africa does a better job of this than East Africa.

See the concrete and steel elephant grating of the “AND PRESERVE” picture above that I took earlier this year in a Botswana park. It’s so simple that it effectively keeps elephants away from the showers and toilets of a public camp site within the park.

But it’s terribly expensive, and East Africa claims not to be able to afford such measures. Instead, ruefully inadequate trenches and fences and electric wiring are still used. It’s a miserable control. It does little but further aggravate the farmers.

And if the farmers and school teachers are aggravated, today, what happens in the next decade when tourism revenues sink below agricultural production, or social services properly created by better education?

You guessed it. The elephant gun trigger gets pulled.

War on Kids

War on Kids

Somalia has been in war for two decades, but it really looks like the pressures on al-Shabaab (al-Qaeda in The Horn) are forcing the game towards an explosive situation, one that the international community will not be able to ignore. Unless we develop new policies for international involvement, right now, the west is doomed to falling into another horrible quagmire.

Yesterday, Amnesty International released a report detailing that both opposing sides in the Somali war are using child soldiers under 15 years old. Primarily this as well as other information suggests to me that within the next year something extraordinary is going to happen in Somalia which will change the political texture of The Horn, and we better be ready.

According to Amnesty, both the Transitional Federal Government (recognized by the U.S.) and its opponent al-Shabaab are now employing the tactics last used by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in Uganda and the DRC.

The LRA lost in Uganda and much of the DRC, and has fled to the totally unstable Central African Republic in a much wounded capacity. Use of child soldiers in Somali means that both sides are growing exhausted.

It probably means that U.S. and western diplomacy to weaken the bad guys is working, and that therefore such formerly easy necessities as getting guns and ammo is not working.

But it’s been two decades of near incessant, heavy, sustained fighting. Famine
was inevitable.

The war effort is reaching exhaustion, and famine grips the country. Grown ups start to dessert. Men (and women) attracted by violent victories supporting their cherished ideologies pick up and go before they’re defeated or starve to death. 1300 refugees daily have been flooding into Kenya from Somalia for nearly two months.

What’s left?

Crazies who are desperate. And desperate men do desperate things, and that’s the immediate worry. One of the more desperate acts right now is with the others who are left in Somalia: Children. Children have fingers that pull triggers. They’re much more easily convinced to do anything. Hungry children rank a meal as a cherished victory. They’re usually smaller (not always), their aim and reliability is not usually as good, but they’re among the last ones standing. There’s no one but crazies and children left to fight.

The LRA lasted for years, nearly ten years, in Uganda. I don’t think that’s going to happen in Somalia. The point of desperation is too great. Something’s got to happen that changes or redefines somehow the whole messy scene. The international community discarded the DRC long ago. But the international community seems loathe to discard Somalia. The garbage man is al-Qaeda.

Amnesty’s electrifying report details awful war crimes on both sides of the Somali conflict; both sides are coming to the end of the line and getting desperate. Defeats are occurring everywhere, but no victories. With no clear winner, no moral side to fully support, what should we do? Occupy the country like Afghanistan? It’s unimaginable right now, but Somalia left to al-Qaeda is a terrifying prospect.

Yet it seems to me that’s exactly what we have to do: rapid withdrawal by the west. And it would be pointless to withdraw from Somalia if we didn’t also simultaneously withdraw from all the extreme Islamic conflicts of the world. And as terrifying as that might seem, I think it’s less terrifying than what might happen if we don’t.

Let’s get out of Afghanistan with something like a negotiated settlement similar to what happened in Vietnam. Abandon Yemen to the hyaenas. Remove all our special forces and other interests from Somalia and sneak away in the dead of night.

Then, we can lick our wounds, beef up our military, and be willing to draw new moral lines in the sand, if as I would expect countries like Kenya – truly representing their democratic societies – asked us to. No legitimate group of Iraqis or Afghanis or Yemenis ever asked us to send the drones and boots. We can’t just stomp around the world, anymore, telling everyone how to live or presuming that entire societies are culpable for the harm that a handful of crazies inflicted on us.

Get the Osamas, yes, not whole sections of the world surrounding a few bad guys.

We need to reset the playing field and morally refine the rules by which we will fight. That horrible neglect in doing so led us into the quagmire that transformed al-Qaeda from our ally to our enemy. It must be reversed, and quickly before we’re sucked in ever deeper.

Think of the children. As our future enemies.

Stuck in the Blah Days in Tanzania

Stuck in the Blah Days in Tanzania

Northern Tanzania seems the epitome of everything that’s wrong with East Africa right now: economic recession, bad weather, a disgruntled population, and all in the context of a government that refuses to reform itself. Ho-hum.

There really is good news in East Africa, now, but at a little distance it just seems like silver linings rather than good news: to wit, the canceling of the Serengeti highway, and last week’s announcement that no new lodges will be built on the rim of Ngorongoro Crater.

Last month the Tanzanian government accepted international demands (especially from UNESCO) that the Serengeti highway not be built, while at the same time assuring Maasai just outside the park that they would get a new road at least up to the park boundary.

Brilliant move. We were ecstatic. Although I had expected by now that the donor funds to build this road and an alternative southern route would have been announced, I still think that’s what will happen.

And last week, after many more years of wrangling than the Serengeti highway issue, the government officially nixed plans by at least three companies for new lodges at Ngorongoro.

Again, brilliant move by a weak government drowning in the blahs. The point is that tourism is down, perhaps way down. Existing lodges are functioning at dangerously low capacities. It would be foolhardy to add any supply, now.

But of course the tourism minister, Ezekiel Maige, said “the area needed to remain natural and free from human pressures.” Right. And good of course, but that’s a sarcastic “right” coming from a government with little real interest in anything but oil rigs and mine shafts.

The lodge controversy at Ngorongoro began in 2005 and 2006, the hay days of safari travel. That’s when the super luxurious and ultra modern Kempinski Bilila Lodge attracted a principal investor named Jakaya Kikwete, Tanzania’s president. Reports indicate that the lodge is now putsing along at a less than 20% capacity.

When things are a bit bad, but not at crisis or catastrophic levels, news tries to push them through that threshhold to a point of gathering wider interest. What a wrong approach! We don’t want to get that point!

Unlike Kenya, Tanzania’s efforts at government reform have stalled. (btw Uganda’s are all but dead to the world.) A newly elected legislature last November, infused with new young blood and maverick politicians, was the greatest hope. They started the gears rolling for a new constitution, a necessary step.

But that’s over. Obese blahs cover the land, and nowhere within Tanzania more so than its important touristic north. It’s a do-nothing time.

The weather is bad but not terrible (March-May rains were well below normal, but rains for the year look OK). Scandals persist as always, with the token official here and there scheduled to be sacked. Climate change gets worse and worse and Ngorongoro Maasai are demonstrating that famine and drought is destroying their lives (while sitting on freshly grown green grass).

What does this mean?

Nothing. That’s the point. We ought not presume that reforms will not take off when things improve, nor be less vigilant that a sneaky government won’t reallocate rim land to developers. Keep your eye on the weather; if it persists through another poor rainy season, then it’s time to worry for sure.

At home, we call these the Dog Days of summer, when it’s just too hot to do anything. In Northern Tanzania I call it the Blah Days, not too hot, not too cold, just not too anything.

No Drought News is Not

No Drought News is Not

It’s raining in the Mara; it should be: That’s not news. It’s not raining in northern Kenya; it shouldn’t be: That’s news. Go figure.

In between truly cataclysmic reports of America’s political constipation last week, many news sources were reporting on the “calamitous” drought in “East Africa.” One concerned consumer emailed me:

“My husband and I are scheduled to go on safari to [East Africa] in 3 weeks and are very concerned since hearing stories of devastation and the death of wildlife due to the drought. We are insured for the trip. Do you recommend we cancel and visit another time when conditions are improved? We have spent an awful lot of money and don’t want to spend 2 weeks in a dustbowl viewing dead and dying animals.”

My office explained it was raining in the Mara. The excellent Governor’s Camp there reported 85.5 mm of rain in June (3.37 inches), a little less than normal, but nothing to write home about.

There are three important issues here.

First, “East Africa” is a big place. When you include all of Somalia, as NPR did in its weekend reporting, the area is nearly the size of half the continental U.S.

There’s a drought in America. There are devastating tornadoes in America. Floods are killing people in America. Wild fires are forcing people out of their homes in America.

Dare you visit the Blues Festival in Brattleboro, Vermont?

Columbia University’s excellent climate reporting website shows the actual precipitation over the last twelve months. (To get the “loop” actually looping, you may have to click on “Precip Loop” in the left-hand blue panel.)

When corroborated with many other similar data sources, what we know is that overall “East Africa” has a pretty normal rain pattern for this year. Somalia and northern Kenya less than “normal” and much of the prime game viewing areas of Kenya and Tanzania normal or just slightly below.

That’s the first issue’s facts. I know in today in America facts seems to matter less and less, but I can’t seem to drop the habit of referring to them.

Second. Climate change is deeply effecting all the tropical regions of the world, including East Africa, more quickly and more extremely than in much of the world including America. This is because of the highly complex way that weather works at the equator. Even when you look up from the equator at the sky, clouds rarely move at all, the confluence of multiple jet streams and mixed up “corioloses” is one of the most complicated swirling and twirling air patterns on earth.

In a nutshell the result has been to make dry drier, and wet wetter. It’s the reason we do have “drought conditions” in northern Kenya almost constantly, interrupted by a season of devastating floods.

Three. And probably most important. The human catastrophe occurring in Somalia, northern Kenya and Ethiopia is hardly new. And the fact that it’s being reported as news is a sorry indication that we don’t care as much as we should.

Do you remember “Live Aid”? That was nearly 30 years ago. Things haven’t changed much since. Admittedly, dry is drier, and there are more people to feed, so famine is more likely and will now occur more often.

Do you remember “Blackhawk Down”? That was nearly 20 years ago. That’s when Bill Clinton let Somalia implode. It’s never come back together.

The human catastrophe in a part of East Africa is human made, not weather made. True, the desert has been growing literally for millennia from north to south on the continent, and East Africa is near the dividing line moving south. But desertification in Africa is not news, happens at a relatively slow pace and can be adequately dealt with by proper human development.

And fresh, good, potable water has been a growing catastrophe in Africa for decades. This, too, has been known for 20-30 years and there are ways to deal with it.

It is the politics of fear, egocentrism, greed and lack of compassion that has been growing at too fast a pace.

It’s raining in the Mara. You can proceed nicely on your safari.