The Yemi Soneye blog

The two extremes of water, drought and flooding are newsmakers. They grip attention of people far and wide and have them follow their visitation.

The potency of the two aberrations that negate water’s benevolence is huge. And as such, they have uncanny abilities to weave into almost every phenomenon. With poverty, they are friends. With terrible township planning or forest plundering, they have strong relationships. And now that the father of all phenomena they can ever have anything to do with, is warming up for the world, the logistics for their coming are in full gear.

The phenomenon is bizarre. On first hear, it makes one go, what the heck? Climate change is really weird. Change should ring a bell of positive h6eralds in one’s ears but this is prime badness. Climate, and that means all her elements, temperature, wind, rainfall, pressure, among others, revolves the world. Everywhere, in geography, meteorology, agriculture, medicine, communication, even in warfare, her hands are very evident. If negative, nothing can be achieved.

Some days ago, when a heavy rain fell in Osogbo- rain falling in November is surely not normal- a bit of the negativity was tasted. The light, of course not unexpected, went. The strange was the going of my phone’s signal for three bad days. In fact, it was for four days. My phone’s signal icon had bars in the evening of the fourth day. I was at a loss about where the insulation that the service provider touts went. To be fair, the service provider is quite efficient. The hand of climate change was just too heavy.

If such harrows were felt over a ‘mere’ deviation in rainfall pattern, climate change projections around the world and the attendant effects on all facets of lives should be shuddering. We, Nigerians, may be chameleons that never lose out in situations, environment or circumstance. We may have evolved tough skins to the fangs of bad leadership, corruption, racketeering and all other palace evils. We may know how to get something out of seemingly nothing. We may have made herbs as recourse over the poor healthcare system and may have cultivated with rain water. However, when climate change becomes fully blown, we become automatic losers.

The World Bank on their climate change blog says that developing and underdeveloped countries, though minor contributor to fossil burning and other environmental destroying activities, will bear the brunt. With the technological, financial and social structures that will enable the developed ones to successfully temper the rage of climate change being absent in the two. The worst part of it all is that the developmental gains that are presently being achieved gradually are to be lost. This is going to be soppy to the rep the countries are attaining now because to start grappling afresh with poverty is a task that will break Hercules himself.

The flooding recently experienced across Nigerian states is a testimony. Across the country, people who were already leaving the gates of poverty had themselves rearrested, thrust and padlocked within the desolate grounds of poverty when the flooding took their livelihoods away. Heavy rain caused it. In some of the states, however, the flooding was attributed to the maliciousness of water dams’ officials. But in the real sense of it, they were faced with the dilemma of either keeping the rising dam closed or opening for a ‘milder’ flooding. The later was more sensible. But it would not have been apocalyptic in any way had there been drainage systems in place. The gushes would have been well managed.

With the strategic geographical location and features in Nigeria, and the unsmiling climate change parameters, we are in bad company. More flooding is imminent. Bites of droughts are also to be expected. The lining of Lagos to Calabar by the Atlantic Ocean, the many rivers and the unattended gullies they have caused, the oil-spilled Niger Delta, the incoming of the Sahara Desert, and many other more, should give the picture.

However gory this might seem, climate change is nothing. It is like fire. Fire can raze to ashes if allowed. But if kept within the confines of kerosene stoves, gas and cookers, on the wick of a candle, and within match boxes, it cannot work disaster. All we need do is to grip climate change by the neck and strangulate her before her monstrosity grows. It is at the bud stage that an undesirable Iroko branch is hacked off the mother.

We do this by focusing on reducing the level of the causative gases in the atmosphere. We have to remove the ways by which we contribute to their releasing. The following are our little, safe and achievable ways.

1. We have to stop breathing. Reason: we remove oxygen gases from air every second only to release tons of carbon dioxide gases.

2. We must switch to raw foods. Reason: by so doing, we would have significantly cut our domestic contributions through cooking etcetera.

3. We must become waste efficient. Reason: by making the wastes our systems produces, we would have eliminated the decomposition means.

4. We must seal our garages. Reason: when we embrace bicycles, there will no longer be anything as the problematic exhausts.

5. Those traveling far distances must attach bottles to their cars. Reason: the bottles are to suck in the exhausts.

You know what? I just read the options myself. Impossible! All of them! Number one is to die blue, of asphyxia. We cannot stop combustion. Our lives revolve around it. When we breathe out, we combust.

So in the imbroglio of not being able to let go of what holds and yet desperate to ward off the resulting problems, we have to find a balance. We need not squint or squeeze brows. Nature already has the solution. She has had it since primordial.

She has it in the equation of combustion and photosynthesis. Had combustion rate not exceeded the rate of photosynthesis, in abnormal proportions since the 1800s when industrialization began, there might not be climate change today. The other gases, methane, carbon monoxide, nitrous oxide, sulphur oxide and others that are now part of the phenomenon might be too negligible to trap heat in the atmosphere.

Therefore, restoring the balance is what our striving should be at. We have to sign a moral deal also. That as much as our activities release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, so will be the rate at which we are going to be planting trees to remove them for food production. It is as simple as that. PLANTING TREES is our only option. It is what, in view of our technological challenges, will save us from flooding, drought and their deathly entourages.

http://www.triumphnewspapers.org/clim17112010.html

My Essay published, on October 15, by Sahara Reporters. http://www.saharareporters.com/article/tribe-no-longer-word

Every tribe.., no; tribe is no longer the word. ‘Tribe’ is too generalized and divisive. If possible, it should be decreed foul by the government. New terms should be coined by the grammarians in the presidency because unless we want to continue selling the vague truths to ourselves, there is little feeling of nationalism in the country.

And when nationalism which is the coin for the payment of our way out of the throes of poverty is absent, it is just too sure that the country will remain in trouble.

Nationalism, I can say, died on October 1st, 1963 when Nigeria became a republic. By then, the divide and rule policies of the governments of the regions and the federal government was already at the brim. It took only four years later before the Biafran civil war would try to kill the nation. Nigeria survived but unfortunately her parts did not. Peace is elusive still.

From 1970, when the civil war ended, to date, Nigeria has experienced ethnic-instigated massacres in which jaded individuals maimed and killed disadvantaged groups of people. The bloods of these people like the biblical cries of Abel against Cain, cry against the nation that cut them in their prime. No one seems to hear their dirges. If anyone is, then the tribal machinery that got them killed would have long been grounded.

Recently, while President Goodluck Jonathan was on state meeting to Plateau State, a very bitter man, though he hid it well, went forward with his pains. Fulani herdsmen took cows from his and his father’s herds with condemnable impunity. Though it did not quite alarm those present at the meeting, it did me. Probably their deadly indifference was justifiable. Probably snatching of cows had become an everyday event. The man was angry. He sweated with venom with each word that he spoke. This only indicates one thing: trouble still brews in that State.

For this country to be better, people must see the sanctity of another person’s property and interests. This, of course, can only happen when we start to see other beings as Nigerians rather than as a member of another tribe. The word ‘tribe’ has to be eliminated from our subconscious.

Nigeria has not gotten over the shoddy manner with which it was formed. Not all her parts wanted to be Nigerians. The Southern Cameroons had an option of not being a part of the entity during the formative years and opted out of the unification. Other parts of Nigeria, were they to have had the option, they would have opted for another alliance other than Nigeria. All that did not happen. We became a country whether we liked it or not. It is now a very abnormal thing to be doing things that will prevent us from enjoying the benefits that alliance offers. We ought to be making the best use of the power of many but obviously we have not been and seem not intent on enjoying it.

The present attempts by politicians in the country to curry the sympathy of voters in the next general elections, is simply mummifying. One of the worst Plateau crises in the past few years was caused by a local government election. The Plateau local politicians played on the volatile condition in the State to ensure victory for themselves. But rather than achieving their aims, they created wide-scale violence. That was local politicking. And that was what it caused.

The present national/tribal politicking must be stopped with all urgency. It is threatening the sovereignty of the nation. We might say that we were made in heaven and if we dance at the brink of destruction for ages we would not disintegrate, but the sheer reality is that unless we want the ship to sink permanently, we have to come together. We have to stop the present divisive campaigning techniques that are newer forms of the first republic’s woes.

We, of course, refer to Nigerians who are banking on the new hope from INEC. We must vote only for the candidate who comes forward, not on the pedestal of a tribe, but as a Nigerian. Tribe is no longer the word; we have had too much of it.