Month: May 2024

NAIROBI, Kenya — The impact of the calamitous rains that struck East Africa from March to May was intensified by a mix of climate change and rapid growth of urban areas, an international team of climate scientists said in a study published Friday.

The findings come from World Weather Attribution, a group of scientists that analyzes whether and to what extent human-induced climate change has altered the likelihood and magnitude of extreme weather events.

The downpours caused floods that killed hundreds of people, displaced thousands of others, killed thousands of livestock and destroyed thousands of acres of crops.

To assess how human-caused climate may have affected the floods, the researchers analyzed weather data and climate model simulations to compare how these types of events have changed between today’s climate and the cooler pre-industrial one. They focused on regions where the impacts were most severe, including southern Kenya, most of Tanzania and a part of Burundi.

It found that climate change had made the devastating rains twice as likely and 5% more intense. The study also found that with further warming, the frequency and intensity of the rains would continue to increase.

“We’re likely to see this kind of intensive rainfall happening this season going into the future,” said Joyce Kimutai, research associate at Imperial College London and the lead author of the study.

The study also found that the rapid urbanization of East African cities is increasing the risk of flooding.

Highly populated urban areas, especially high-density informal settlements, were significantly impacted by the downpours. Torrential rain flooded houses and roads, in some places exposing weaknesses in urban planning to meet the demands of fast-growing populations.

March to May is “long rains” season in East Africa. It’s when most of the region’s average annual rainfall occurs, and is typically characterized by torrential rains.

East Africa also suffered flooding during the “short rains” of October to December 2023 and before that, it endured a three-year drought. WWA scientists found that both events were worsened by climate change.

Philip Omondi, climate change specialist at the IGAD Climate Prediction and Applications Centre in Nairobi and wasn’t involved in the study, said human-caused impacts result in intense and high-frequency extreme floods and droughts.

Shaun Ferris, senior technical advisor for agriculture and climate change at Catholic Relief Services in Nairobi, said more intense weather put a new level of pressure on old and unplanned buildings and basic infrastructure and there’s a need to put up infrastructure that will be more able to cope with climate change.

“There is huge pressure on basic services,” he said giving the example of Nairobi, whose population has doubled over the past 20 years.

Ferris said that the global community needs to start using the loss and damage fund for climate disasters so they can repair and upgrade their basic infrastructure.
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Nairobi, Kenya — A record 75.9 million people are living in internal displacement due to conflict, and nearly half that number is in sub-Saharan Africa, according to a recent report.

The report from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, or IDMC, shows 34.8 million people in the region were displaced in 2023, up from the previous year. The biggest increase came in Sudan, which is currently in the midst of civil war.

Sudanese doctor Aisha Hassan is among the millions of people newly displaced last year. 

The doctor said that when she arrived for work at a hospital to tend to those injured in the country’s ongoing civil war, she faced threats from the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces and gangs. The RSF has been at war with the Sudanese armed forces since April of last year. 

The threat forced her to leave her patients and her city, Omdurman, northwest of the capital, Khartoum. Hassan said she and her family fled to safety. 

“From there I went to North Sudan Al-Shimaliyya, it’s called Karima. We stayed there for three months, and my family and I went to Port Sudan. From there we displaced here to Uganda,” she said. 

Fighting between the Sudanese armed forces and the RSF has displaced 9.1 million since April 2023, making Sudan the country with the most displaced people globally. According to the IDMC, the number marks “the most ever recorded in a single country since records began in 2008.” 

The conflict has made it difficult for aid agencies to reach the millions in need, triggering more displacement as people search for food, water, medicine and safety.  

Elsewhere, fighting in the Democratic Republic of Congo between the army and rebels has displaced close to 7 million people. Conflict in Ethiopia that began with a two-year war in Tigray in 2020, and erupted in many parts of the country, displaced 790,000 people last year.  

Africa’s conflicts are usually over territory, community politics, and control over resources, with at least 10 African countries, predominantly in West Africa, dealing with terrorism-related conflicts. 

Burkina Faso is the most affected of the West African countries, with 700,000 people displaced last year, up 61 percent from 2022.  

“A rising conflict is really contributing to the rising trend, and especially weather-related disasters, including floods, storms, and drought, are also contributing to pushing the figures to an all-time high,” said Vicente Anzellini, coordinator and lead author of the IDMC report. “So all of this is really a concerning trend. It’s important to underscore, however, that governments and humanitarian actors are taking more action and are producing more data. And this, of course, influences the trend.” 

Anzellini said governments need to improve their capabilities to resolve conflicts and cope with natural disasters.  

“What we’re really seeing in the region should be a reason for concern and more efforts need to be put in conflict resolution, of peace building, and disaster risk reduction across this region to reduce the trend that, again, highly influences the global trend,” Anzellini said. “So if internal displacement is addressed and reduced in Africa, the global trend will also successfully reduce. And it’s unfortunately not a trend that we’re seeing in the last couple of years. And for this to happen more government leadership and investments will be needed.” 

The Swiss-based agency says the overwhelming majority of the displaced stay in their own countries as they struggle to survive and rebuild their lives. 

For Hassan, it was too dangerous for her to stay, as armed groups started to loot her family’s home while she was working in the hospital in Sudan. 

“After two months or so, the Rapid Support team came and resided in our home,” she said. “Now they are living in our home. I don’t know how many of them there are, but they told us they are living there. They took my father’s car, and they are living there.” 

The IDMC says no country is immune to disaster displacement and that conflicts in Sudan, the DRC, and the Palestinian territories drove up the number around the world.
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International investors have been lining up for South African nuclear energy technology this year. Two partnerships have been announced aimed at financing the manufacture of a new prototype, small-scale reactor developed in South Africa. One partner includes a collective of family farmers whose businesses are suffering from the country’s unreliable power grid. Marize de Klerk reports from South Africa’s capital, Pretoria.
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Johannesburg — Many South African political parties are using populist rhetoric ahead of what is being described as the most important election in 30 years.

One South African political party running in the May 29 elections wants mass expulsions of foreign migrants and the return of the death penalty. Another party regularly sings about killing White farmers. Yet another pushes for changing from “Roman-Dutch law” to African traditions and wants to send teenage mothers to a former prison island.

Gayton McKenzie, the leader of a small opposition party named the Patriotic Alliance and who spent 17 years in jail for robbery, speaks a law-and-order message.

“As a person that grew up as a gangster, that grew up as a criminal, a person that understands the underworld, I’m here today to tell you the only way to stop the crime, the killings,” he said at a rally earlier this year. “Under my regime, if you kill somebody, you shall be killed also. … We want law and order back in South Africa.”

Like populist leaders the world over, he positions himself as an outsider taking on a supposedly elite and corrupt establishment.

Beyond advocating for the death penalty, he has also promised to “bring God back into schools.” Immigration is his other key theme, in which he constantly rails against undocumented migrants from other African nations, blaming them for most of the country’s woes — from the unemployment crisis to crime. He’s even raised the idea of building a border wall.

Political analyst Tessa Dooms said she sees similarities between the political rhetoric in South Africa and the United States under former President Donald Trump, who is seeking a return to power in November.

“I think what’s becoming clear in this election is that there is almost a Trumpian type of moment that is developing where people are resisting establishment politics and big political parties particularly because they feel like those parties are far removed from them, are not accountable to them, and are not engaged with them,” Dooms said.

The Economic Freedom Fighters, or EFF — the nation’s third-largest party — is South Africa’s original populist rabble-rouser. Its red-beret-wearing leader, Julius Malema, has twice been charged with hate speech and for firing a gun at a public rally.

The EFF advocates “radical economic transformation” — the nationalization of land and banks. Malema has also suggested arming the Hamas militant group.

Established less than a year ago, Umkhonto we Sizwe, or the MK party, which is predicted to get the third- or fourth-largest share of the vote, has also assumed the populist mantle.

It’s led and represented by former President Jacob Zuma, although he can’t run for parliament due to a 2021 prison sentence he was given for contempt of court.

Zuma, who was forced to resign as president in 2018 due to corruption scandals, has an axe to grind with his former party, the governing African National Congress. He also retains considerable popularity among fellow ethnic Zulus in his home province, despite allegations against him.

On the campaign trail this year, he has railed against South Africa’s progressive constitution, what he calls “white law,” and argued that traditional chiefs and leaders should be given more power.

He’s made derogatory comments about LGBTQ+ rights — which are protected by law in South Africa.

Zuma has also floated the idea of dealing with teenage pregnancy by sending young mothers to continue their education on Robben Island — the former prison where he and Nelson Mandela, who would also go on to become president, were jailed under Apartheid.

Another party, the right-wing Afrikaans party Freedom Front Plus, advocates for the secession of the Western Cape province, dubbed CapeXit.

As a country, South Africa has many conditions that make it fertile breeding ground for populism, analysts say. Unemployment is among the highest in the world, many still live in dire poverty, there are almost daily power cuts due to a flailing electricity grid, and there are high rates of murder and sexual violence.

“People are just exhausted and just want to know there are people who are going to fix things fast and are willing to do whatever it takes to get those things resolved,” Dooms said.

This month’s elections are being seen as pivotal, because 30 years after the end of apartheid, some polls project the ANC could get under 50% for the first time and be forced to enter a coalition government.

But with small populist parties on the rise, the concern now is who they would join with.
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