{UAH} Pojim/WBK: Sod oil and hang copper, just set my people free - Comment
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Sod oil and hang copper, just set my people free
When all is said and done, 2015 will go down as one of the worst recent years for East Africa — and indeed Africa.
First, a second new civil conflict in Africa started in East Africa, in Burundi. The last one was South Sudan in December 2013.
In West Africa, an epidemic of Ebola that was been largely ignored in early 2014 went on the rampage, bringing Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea to their knees.
Ebola is no stranger here, having made a call in Uganda before. The difference with the West African chapter was the extent to which it just overwhelmed the three countries and how helpless Africa was.
It took nearly the whole of the rest of the world, the UN, EU, the Chinese, Cubans, British and Americans (the latter two even throwing their armies at it), and close to all of a year and 4,000 bodies, to get on top of it.
Beyond everything else, Ebola exposed the weakness of African states and how feeble their institutions are.
The next blow didn't kill, but perhaps even more than Ebola, it put paid to a lie — that African economies had changed. It took a dip in oil prices, a slump in commodities like copper, and a slowdown in the China behemoth that was gobbling up Africa's natural resources in record amounts, for extended crisis to set in.
In Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda, currencies went soft like cotton candy. Countries that were considered economic stars, like Ghana and Mozambique, went running to the IMF. Angola, that at one point was close to making more money from oil and minerals than its corrupt leaders could steal, all but went belly up.
We were too reliant for survival on other people's appetite for things that formed millions of years ago in our soil. We didn't make things that were insulated against the fickleness of global markets.
It's good to have oil and copper to sell, but you also need to make insulin, mobile phones, chocolate, which people in difficult times will buy because their lives depend on it, or because it gives them much needed comfort.
So why don't we? It's actually out of character. I visited a Kenyan who lives on the outskirts of Nairobi and he had a massive network of water tanks at the back of his house. Two of them stored water from Nairobi Water. A third he pumped in water from a rain-fed reservoir. The fourth drew water from his neighbour's borehole! There's a man who will never go thirsty.
He used to work in government, but didn't bring that kind of savviness and foresight to his state job because there was no room for it.
If we acted like the good man, the kind of economic train wreck that Nigeria and Angola are today, would not have happened or be so severe.
If you want to see this African ingenuity, all of it not directed by the state, you need to watch the 2011 BBC series "Human Planet." We are an awesome people, and can create magic from the most extreme circumstances.
And so the case of the Plan B-C-D water gentleman also points to the best and cheapest way the continent can prosper; just set the people free, and don't steal the fruit of their sweat.
Charles Onyango-Obbo is editor of Mail & Guardian Africa (mgafrica.com). Twitter@cobbo3
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