Latest Articles by Poppy Toland

Challenging Africa (1)

Poppy Toland — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 05:35:00 +0000

How can Africa achieve development through protecting its environment? In the first of two parts, Poppy Toland interviews Wangari Maathai, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and founder of the Green Belt Movement.

Poppy Toland: In your book, The Challenge for Africa, you outline disempowerment as the root to a lot of the problems in Africa. And you mention loss of culture as the main culprit for environmental degradation. How do these processes happen?

Wangari Maathai: A lot of these are actually based on my own personal experiences: working in Africa, trying to do something in Africa which is positive for the community, for the general good, for the common good, but yet finding it very difficult to move forward. And I’ve found that there are so many issues. Quite often people ask, “What’s wrong with Africa? We’ve given Africa so much money; it is an independent region, why aren’t they moving forward?” I wanted to say, it is not just one issue, you cannot say: “Africa is corrupt, therefore…” or, “Africa doesn’t have technology, therefore…” or, “Africa is not democratic, therefore…” There are a lot of issues that all come together to create a very un-conducive environment for development.

So it is the destruction of the African culture as the result of the colonial legacy; it is the creation of artificial states: they are represented as states, it’s a factor that you have communities, which I call tribes or micro-nationalities, who are suddenly expected to work together, as if France and Britain would have worked together 100 years ago!

PT: This is the “sitting on the wrong bus” theory?

WM: Yes. The way to do it is to turn around the bus, but first and foremost is recognising that you are on the wrong bus to begin with. Because if you don’t recognise you are on the wrong bus and keep moving in the same direction, you are actually not going anywhere, because you are on the wrong bus. These are some of the issues that confronted me personally as I was working in my own situation, and I thought that these are the issues that we should really think about and we should address so that we can move forward.

PT: You suggest the example of bed nets: if they are given to people and their value isn’t really understood, people don’t really look after them or mend them properly. Is there a similar issue with the land and with the environment?

WM: Land is different because you can see what you are doing with the land, but also without appreciating the fact that land degrades. If you cut trees, the land degrades. The soil disappears. And if you don’t have the soil, then you’re not going to be able to grow food. And for you to grow food you need rainfall, and rainfall comes because you have forests. So if you don’t understand the relationship between the rains and the rivers and the forest, you will destroy the forest and then you won’t have rain. So, it is this lack of understanding – ignorance – that needs to be addressed.

PT: Is this something that people in the past understood? You talk about the need to re-learn, rather than start from scratch.

WM: In the past, first of all, people were learning from their parents. Now we’ve broken that cycle and send our children to school, but they are not being taught things that are very helpful. They are being taught almost in a vacuum, and that does not connect to the experiences of yesterday. Therefore, they are not able to make the linkages that help them. And at the same time, they are learning in an environment where they are being told that their past doesn’t matter, what their grandparents knew doesn’t matter and it is what they are being taught in school now that matters. Then they come out of school and they realise that with what they have learned, they are not able to manage all the problems that they encounter. So they fail. And they are lost because they don’t know what’s wrong with them, because they think, “But I did everything right that I was told.” There is this disconnect.

PT: You talk about leadership and its problems, and you talk about problems on a small scale, such as those of the macadamia nut farmers. At what level can change be brought about?

WM: I keep coming back to leadership, because I keep coming to the fact that a lot of us need to be guided – and the system needs to help us. The people who are in charge of the system are the government, the leadership. They are the political leadership, the elite, they are the people who came to countries like Britain, they went to America, they went to India, they studied. So I challenge them, not to take advantage of the ignorance of their own people or other people, but to provide the guidance that is needed, because they, more than their people, understand the world in which we live now, in the twenty-first century. I present them as the people who can break the vicious cycle, and I put myself in that position and I say, “OK, I went abroad, I studied, I came back, I wanted to break the vicious cycle and that’s why I have engaged myself in this process”. But I have encountered these problems, because my fellow elite, the leaders, are not ready to turn the bus around – they want us to keep driving in the wrong bus, even though they know it’s the wrong bus. While they are driving in this bus, they are OK. They are not suffering; they have enough to eat; they are living in beautiful houses; they have enough income; their children are going to school and they can go abroad. It is the passengers who are in the bus that need help. So I ask, “You and I know that this is the wrong bus, can we turn it around?”

PT: How do people react when you challenge them like this?

WM: I will see when they read the book. But at least a few people that I have been able to reach in the course of these 30 years, I have seen them turn around. I have also seen the passengers in the bus realise, “Oh, we are in the wrong bus, let us turn.” I have seen them take some very courageous steps, and that is why we can say that today we have a greater democratic space then we had before, that we are able to hold elections which we could not hold before – free elections, that we are able to challenge in ways that we were not able to challenge before.

PT: Have you felt more hopeful in the past five years about the way things have been going?

WM: In 2003, I was very, very hopeful, because in 2002 [Kenya] had managed to get rid of the government that we had been trying to get rid of for a long time, and we brought in a government that we had a lot of hope in. But unfortunately the people turned around and became just the opposite of what I thought they would be. So at the moment we are in a situation which is very hopeless. After what happened last year, it seemed like we were going backwards, where we came from. But I am still hopeful that we will be able to move forward and that we will last at least until 2012 and see what kind of leadership we get.

NEXT: How can China help Africa?

Poppy Toland is a freelance writer based in London.

Wangari Maathai is a Kenyan environmental and political activist. In 2004 she became the first African woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Homepage image by greenbeltmovement

Challenging Africa (2)

Poppy Toland — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 06:00:00 +0000

How can foreign agencies and governments, including China, really help Africa? In the second section of a two-part interview, Poppy Toland talks to Wangari Maathai.

Poppy Toland: You mention that environmental sustainability was low on the list for the Millennium Development Goals. You see it more suitably placed as the central goal from which other goals all radiate. How could this be done?

Wangari Maathai: The truth of the matter is that the seventh development goal is the environment. When you look at all the other related development goals, they can only be realised if you have a good environment – if you have a healthy environment, if you have clean drinking water, if you have food secure, if you have security.

If you use the Green Belt Movement model as an example, we say if you take care of the environment and if you take care of the land, you can give yourself food, and if you are eating the right food, 50% of your health is taken care of. If you are drinking clean drinking water, another part of your health problems are taken care of. If you are eating well, and you are living in a clean and healthy environment, you are more likely to feel that your child – your unborn child – is going to be born healthy. In the Green Belt Movement, if you plant trees and you make them survive we give you a financial income; we give you a financial token of appreciation. If we were the government, we could make that income much higher. Once you have money, you can send your children to school and you can buy them books, you can buy them a uniform. If they are sick, you can take them to hospital. So, by taking care of the environment you can reduce your poverty.

PT: How easy is it to convince people of this as a priority?

WM: I hope that they will read about it. […] When people think about the Millennium Development Goals, they think poverty, because that’s what they see. They forget that poverty is a symptom of what has gone wrong in the environment. People in general, development agencies, tend to deal with symptoms. They don’t want to go to the root cause of the problem.

PT: Is that because they aren’t seeing the problem for what it is?

WM: I think it’s just the way they look at issues: they go out to solve problems. I’ll give you an example: if you want to give people clean drinking water, you go to the river and you find out that the river is laden with silt. So the water is soiled, it is red with silt. What you think about is how to clean the water, so you look for filters to clean the water, instead of going upstream to find out where the soil is coming from. If you want to remedy this you should plant vegetation on the sloping areas where the silt is coming from: go to the root of the problem and remove the problem. If you are sick, it is not enough to get an aspirin, that’s a temporary cure. Go to the root of the problem: know why the person is sick and remove the germ that is causing the symptoms that you see. It’s simple, but we don’t think like that, we tend to deal with the symptom rather than the root causes.

PT: When you discuss foreign aid agencies, you also talk about China and its increased involvement in Africa. It is sometimes perceived as a negative thing in the west. How is this relationship perceived in Africa?

WM: I can think of two aspects: a positive aspect and a negative aspect. I have been an advocate of better governance in Africa for very long time – and someone who was constantly telling the western world not to continue to support dictators and repressive regimes in Africa, because their support and the sources they get from them will be used to continue suppressing people. It is only after the fall of communism that we started seeing the west lift the grip they had on African countries, and allow them to be free and allow democratic processes to take root in Africa. Before that, they had their grip, because it was a competition between the west and the east. At that time, those of us who were advocating for greater democratic space were constantly telling the western governments not to support those governments, not to give them aid, not to give them loans, to demand accountability, to demand respect for human rights. In other words, to put conditions on what you are doing with them, so they can allow their people to be freer. With the disappearance of communism, that has become unnecessary, because the western countries have released them. But now comes China, and China can deal with the African governments without regarding any conditionalities, and that means that governments can behave as they please. They don’t have the western “Big Brothers” now – looking and asking questions. To me, that can be bad for many African governments and many African people whose governments decide that they don’t have to be accountable to anybody, because they can get things done with China without worrying about the repercussions.

So, what can you do about China? Very little really, because again I would have to go back to the leadership issue: it’s the African people – if they don’t want to help their people, China will probably say, “I’m not accountable to the people, I’m doing business. It is the governments that are accountable to their people.”

But that is the bad part of it. The good part of it is that they’re bringing new business and they are bringing a lot of work there, and it is a very good thing that they are doing business with Africa. But I also think that we are still in the middle of the struggle for a freer Africa, an Africa where leaders are accountable to their people, where they protect their resources. When you think of a country like Sudan, for example, where you have communities that are fighting over oil, even over grazing land, you would hope that China would be concerned about the atrocities that are taking place in a country like that. But China may decide, “That’s not my problem, that’s the problem of the Sudanese government.” […] Of course, that is what the government of Sudan want: to do business with a country that doesn’t interfere with what they call “internal affairs”. Yet it is very important for all of us interfere with internal affairs, when “internal affairs” means terrorising the lives of citizens.

PT: Can Africa rise up when aid is still being given?

WM: I know that this is the theme of a book that recently came out. I think that Dambisa Moyo has a point in the case she is putting forward, in that African governments should not be given aid by other governments, because they are not using it properly, they have been given so much and they can’t show anything for it.

My assessment would be that this might not be helpful. I would rather ask the African people why they have to be punished by other governments before they can be good to their people. That’s the question I would ask to them, because we do need help. We do need aid. Even rich governments borrow. Doesn’t the American government borrow from China? What is important is that the money that is borrowed is used for the purpose for which it was borrowed. The billions of dollars that were given to Africa, if they were analysed to see what they were actually used for, we would probably be shocked to see the amount that actually arrived in Africa. Now, who is responsible for that? It is partly the African people, because they allowed that to happen. For me, the challenge is really in the African people: if African governments are not supported, it’s not as if they will sacrifice their own resources to help their people – they will probably let their people die, if they can’t give them what they can give them with aid. I’m not advocating that they should be given aid and use it as they please, but we need to challenge the African people and the African leadership, to use resources for they are meant for. I want to ask them: do you have to be whipped by another government before you can be good to your people?

I hope my book will be read by ordinary Africans, because ordinary Africans are also to blame, because they allowed that to happen. They allow themselves to elect leaders who are very irresponsible – so, to a certain extent, they are responsible for the leaders they get. The book is supposed to be a challenge for Africa, because for so long we blamed others: we say it is colonialism, we say it is this or that. In this book, I say we challenge ourselves. Because I was working in the trenches for more than 30 years and I did not see any outsiders blocking me from doing what I needed to do. It was my own people who were blocking me. It was an African government who was blocking me. I didn’t see outsiders, so I know that the enemy of Africa, first and foremost, is Africa. And that is where we must break the cycle.

Poppy Toland is a freelance writer based in London.

Wangari Maathai is a Kenyan environmental and political activist. In 2004 she became the first African woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Homepage image by Mia MacDonald