LIP SERVICE: Beneath the veneer of empty platitudes, the Africa Climate Summit was mere geopolitics at play, with the West attempting to reinstate its hegemony over the continent…

By Mordecai Ogada

According to the Cambridge dictionary, globalism is “the idea that events in one country cannot be separated from those in another and that economic and foreign policy should be planned in an international way”.

At first glance, this appears to be a rather benign concept that can even be seen as beneficial when applied to commerce, or in the context of universal human needs like water, human rights and health.

However, when it is applied in the context of natural resource management and conservation, it is a delusion that takes on a malevolent quality, threatening sovereignty, resource rights, climate resilience and even the health of hundreds of millions of people around the world.

By and large, globalisation has been a positive human development, but it has spawned a cruel child that follows the same economic strata in the pursuit of power, fuelled by the climate crisis and perceptions thereof.

It is instructive to note that the stratification occasioned by environmental globalism places the Global South firmly on the bottom rung. This is the core injustice, because nations of the Global South are custodians of over 75 per cent of the world’s biodiversity and produce less than 50 per cent of total global emissions. The most powerful and destructive quality of environmental globalism is its capacity to confer acceptability, normality, or even invisibility to the most egregious violations of human rights and sovereignty.

This delusion played out blatantly at the Africa Climate Summit 2023 held in Nairobi from September 4 to 6 2023. The summit was touted as a meeting where “the world” (read: the Western capitalist world) would acknowledge (and somehow reward) Africa’s role in conserving biodiversity and mitigating climate change.

The situation on the ground, however, was very different, because the discussions centred on “carbon markets” and other amorphous financial instruments. These were accompanied by the usual platitudes and lip service to the injustices and suffering in Africa caused by climate change for which the continent only has five per cent responsibility, based on their proportion of global emissions.

Like clockwork, the African leaders present came out, cup in hand, pleading for a share of this amorphous thing referred to as “climate financing”, forgetting that these wealthy nations have only made good on 12 per cent of the climate financing commitments made in Paris a decade earlier.

Herd or Coerce

So what was the purpose of this meeting, given that there was so much repetition of what had already been promised earlier and remains unfulfilled?

This meeting reveals that it was more of an “assignment” given to Kenya by the Swedish government, which also financed the meeting. The brief to the Kenyan government was simple: herd, or otherwise coerce, as many African governments into a common position in support of the West’s position in preparation for COP 28 to be held in Dubai from November 30 to December 12 2023.

A key part of that “common position” has been the repeated absolution of the West from blame for the irreparable harm done to the global environment since the Industrial Revolution. It is a position that was repeated throughout the summit.

As an African society that aspires to justice, however, it is incumbent upon us (and the wider global community) to recognise that this is a position that has no moral, scientific, or logical standing. Even more perplexing is the fact that the countries seeking to absolve the West from responsibility for the environmental crisis are the same ones expecting various forms of reparations from them for the same environmental impacts.

Kenya’s President William Ruto read out the “Nairobi Declaration” at the end of the summit, outlining several demands and proposals on behalf of “Africa”, despite the fact that, of the 54 countries that make up the continent, only 14 heads of state attended.

A continent of 1.3 billion people. Why would African countries have a common position on environmental issues at COP28?

Most of the countries that skipped the summit didn’t bother explaining why, but Nigeria, Uganda and South Africa made their positions known. According to a Kenyan diplomat, Nigeria didn’t want to come and be “a bystander at the summit while being lectured by the worst emitters” (of greenhouse gases). Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni refused to attend because of (US climate envoy) John Kerry’s involvement in addressing Africans yet he was a citizen of the “world’s biggest polluter”. South Africa didn’t come because they are currently facing an electricity power crisis and they are being pressured to give up coal, one of their most important energy sources.

So what, pray, was the purpose of this strange function in Nairobi? It was a sad day for Kenya when we bought into, and became purveyors, of the intellectual contempt that is so typical of Western attitudes towards Africa. This meeting, the platitudes, the posturing, the electric vehicles and propaganda had very little to do with the environment. It was simply global geopolitics. Very few people would fail to notice the massive global power shift to the East over the last two-three years in terms of commerce, innovation, industry, and other fields. Western power in the 19th and 20th centuries was built and maintained on the back of the military industrial complex, but this primitive, blunt tool can no longer ensure dominance in a complex, informed world.

Global North

“Concern for the environment” is the only remaining tool that the West has at its disposal to try and achieve anything approaching the hegemony it used to exercise over the Global South, particularly Africa. The duplicity of creating and pushing “carbon markets” while continuing unabated with their industries and emissions has a two-fold benefit for the Global North, if it succeeds.

Firstly, they can slow down development and maintain dependency in the South by curtailing the use of natural resources and using these countries as “carbon sinks” for Northern excesses. Secondly, they can conjure up a position of leadership based on non-existent environmental stewardship, in spite of their being the world’s top emitters and consumers. This “leadership” is exercised on global platforms, particularly the UN, which has fully adopted the crisis narrative.

The choice of Kenya certainly couldn’t have been based on our credentials as a nation, so why was the Africa Climate Summit held here?

The choice was more likely based on Kenya’s characteristically blank policy slate onto which foreign interests can be stencilled as and when needed. Where the chosen tool is conservation, Kenya provides the best “entry point” into Africa because of our inability to separate conservation from foreign tourism, and our official obsession with the latter.

As early as 1972, the Guyanese scholar and Pan-African thinker Walter Rodney said that international imperialism was turning Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania into “wildlife republics” where “every effort was made to attract tourists to look at the animals, and the animals assumed priorities higher than human beings…” He went on to refer to tourism as one of the new areas of “expansion of the imperialist economy” and a new way of confirming the dependence and subjugation of Third World economies.

Tanzania and Uganda developed their own political and cultural identities over the decades, but Kenya excelled in the role of “client state”, making us the preferred choice for Western projects. What, then, did we gain from the so-called African Climate Summit? Environmentally, nothing at all, but we learned that our continent is the custodian of the resources on which the world’s future depends.

Hopefully, we also learned that Africa’s future belongs to the nations that are committed to their own people’s needs and aspirations.

Comment

POLITICIANS’ EGG-DANCE ENDURES

Elsewhere in this publication, we publish an article written by former Statistician-General Pali Lehohla paying tribute to black consciousness icon Steve Biko, whose death in police custody 46 years still evokes emotion, not only among the adherents of the political philosophy he espoused, but also about the niggling paucity of his example today. Inevitably, Lehohla invokes a few nuggets of wisdom from Biko, mostly shared during his defining interview with Bernard Zylstra three months before his cold-blood murder in police custody, in which the black consciousness icon provided important pointers helpful towards understanding what South Africa and the rest of world faced today. Of the 11 themes addressed by Biko during the interview, what resonates today are Black consciousness and Christianity, homelands, communism, South Africa and the United States, black communalism, the future of America, and the Human bond.

Underpinning all these themes – of course – is the concept of leadership and its accompanying responsibility – whether exercised by an individual, a community or a nation like America which regards itself as an undisputed superpower.

Truly uncanny that Lehohla homed in on this particular interview when Biko had many incisive interviews during his lifetime. For most of the themes in the Zylstra interview preoccupy not only our nation today, but also the rest of the world as it grapples with the inevitable transitioning of the World Order from a unipolar to a multipolar dispensation. No doubt South Africa’s hosting of the BRICS summit last month is a representation of that unfolding shift in the balance of power, threatening centuries of West’s dominance of the World and propelling it towards an imminent superpower axis, in which both China and Russia are the fulcrum.

And this seismic shift looming now and Biko having somehow having prophesied about its imminence is rather uncanny – as the black consciousness leader’s allusions in that interview also to the enigma of Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi (can you believe it?), and 46 years the Prince passing o the same month as the anniversary of Biko’s death. Not only that, Biko also touched on South Africa’s relations with the US, and then the rapport between the nations coming under threat in recent months leading to the BRICS summit.

On the homelands, Lehohla quotes Biko as viewing this apartheid system of fragmentation of black people – in which Buthelezi participated – then as a dilution and division of the cause of struggle. Biko, Lehohla goes on, was specifically worried by the stance that Chief Minister Mangosuthu Buthelezi took. “For a long time”, Biko said, “Shenge opposed apartheid, but was today the governmentally paid leader of the Zulus. We oppose Gatsha. He dilutes the cause by operating on a government platform.”

With Buthelezi buried in a colourful state funeral last Saturday, amid a torrent of protest given the politician’s bloody past, the question is, what would Biko have said about this intriguing turn of events and the deliberate, expedient sanitising of history by the ANC? Indeed, politics and hypocrisy are two sides of the same coin…