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OPINION

By Simon Kaheru

Please let us observe a moment of silence for the East Africans we have lost to floods over the last couple of weeks — in Kenya, Tanzania, Burundi and Ethiopia.

After that, say a word of prayer for hundreds of thousands of compatriots who are now homeless because of those very same floods in our neighbourhood.

Dead and homeless, their tragedy is that they are nameless to most of us out here and shall never be recognised. Looking at the photographs and videos of the victims of this extreme weather pattern should tug at your heartstrings, if you are a normal African.

Sadly, for this continent, most of us who have the internet access to see the footage of our fellow Africans in their wretchedness are ironically too far removed from them to be in the same spectrum of normal.

And yet we are so close to each other every day; I have neighbours here who can hear my dogs bark and yet who face the immediate risk of perishing, if a flood came visiting.

A couple of weeks ago we — Africans — were sharing messages and videos about the floods in Dubai, mostly because of how inconceivable it was for floods to happen in “the desert”.

Mostly, we were enthusing about the cars in the videos, so much so that my 14-year-old said out loud how “sad” it was to see so many expensive cars going to waste under the floods.

That tragedy reported about 20 deaths in the UAE and Oman combined and no word of homelessness. There were flight inconveniences, gridlocked traffic — both a rarity for them — and some people even running leisure activities on the street rivers for their social media posts.

We live in very different worlds and once we have understood how different ours is on the wrong end of the scale we need to sit up and pay more attention to fixing it as Africans.

The cause of the floods is not a surprise at all. We received El Niño warnings a whole year ago. The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) issued an advisory when I was in Nairobi in March last year.

I even discussed it with a driver there — one Paul Kithome — who immersed himself in the conversation regardless of his lack of advanced education in the environmental sciences.

The more educated amongst us did what we normally do, focusing on life as usual and now we are waking up to share prayers, words of sympathies and hashtag messages of support in between narcissistic updates about our BBQ grills and imported cars.

The warnings were very, very clear and even today we are not out of deep waters (not a pun, either):

“The 2023-24 El Niño has peaked as one of the five strongest on record. It is now gradually weakening, but it will continue to impact the global climate in the coming months, fuelling the heat trapped by greenhouse gases from human activities. Above normal temperatures are predicted over almost all land areas between March and May.”

That makes it obvious that we need to watch our crops and other food systems, because they will be affected for sure.

The warnings are shared for this very purpose and, in case we are a bit too daft to realise this, they state things like: “... the seasonal forecasts are found to be more accurate during El Niño and La Niña events, particularly in the tropics, and this emphasises the pivotal role of early warnings tosupport decision-making and enhance preparedness and anticipatory action.”

And the WMO says it is not just about water and flooding; there will also be drier and warmer conditions in parts of our patch — in southern Africa — which are also problematic.

This is not about government(s), mind, and their ministries of disaster preparedness and whatnot.

Our opportunities to help before these disasters struck included those of us in the private sector or the ordinary citizenry.

One organisation, the ‘Humanitarian Open Street Map Team’ (hotosm.org) ran an exercise from August to October last year in which anybody could add to an online map their areas of concern in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia.

“...we will be mapping to create datasets to support early warning flood systems so that the lives of people, their food sources, and property can be protected during the heavy winds and rain caused by El Niño,” they said, inviting us to join in.

Judging from their website alone, they do commendable work in different parts of the world, collaborating with FAO and other organisations, and getting ordinary people with mobile phones to submit data that helps with planning and preparing for disasters.

Did we even know about this, what with all the attention we give to socialites at their parties, and politicians with their shenanigans?

I bet you were today years old, as the young people say...

Fellow Africans, until we decide to be serious about the disasters that keep hitting and killing and displacing us, we will continue to suffer them and be defined by them.

The images of Kenya and Tanzania vs. Dubai and Oman will continue to be starkly opposite in composition yet apposite in circumstance — just because they know how to plan, prepare, invest and look after their people and we seem not to.

www.skaheru.com

@skaheru