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In April this year, Kenya’s long rains failed, putting 1.2 million people at risk of starving to death. By the time relief food made its way to the most remote parts of the country, 17 people had died of hunger, amid government denials.
At the same time, Tanzania was on high alert for a deadly cyclone that threatened towns near the Indian Ocean.
People moved to higher ground and waited with bated breath for the same kind of devastation that a similar cyclone had wrought on neighbouring Mozambique just a few weeks before.
Luckily, Cyclone Kenneth changed direction at the last minute, sparing Tanzania but hitting Mozambique, further weakening an already fragile country.
Such are the contradictions of East Africa today. While in one part of the region people are drowning and dying in violent storms, in another part others are dying due to lack of water. Both these extremes have their roots in runaway climate change and biodiversity loss.
Yet East African governments seem unable or unwilling to act on this important link.
Environmental protection and natural resource management continue to take a backseat, with countries instead funnelling most of their money towards big infrastructure projects.
They seem to have tacitly made a choice: That development will take priority over the environment, even at great cost to the quality of lives and livelihoods of their citizens, which economic development is supposed to fix anyway.
This year’s budget allocations reflect this reality most accurately.
Uganda, for example, allocated only $267 million for water and environment, against $1.7 billion for roads and $800 million for energy.
Kenya will spend a paltry $838 million on water and environment, while investing a massive $2.5 billion on transport and other infrastructure, on top of the $4.4 billion allocated to the president’s Big Four agenda that includes housing, universal healthcare, manufacturing and food security.
Tanzania will spend $2.15 billion on infrastructure and only $344.5 million on the environment, natural resources and water.
The thinking is that if governments can build enough roads, railways and industrial zones, that if they can set aside more land for agriculture and intensify the means of production, that if they can invest more in health interventions, that if they spend massive amounts of money on energy production, then the result will be a happy, healthy, prosperous population.
They are not wrong. But this is an incomplete answer and it misses the big picture.
Failing to invest in ecological infrastructure alongside economic allocations will cost the countries not only the health of their natural environments, but will also make it that much harder for them to achieve their developmental goals.
Taking care of forests, wildlife and wetlands, for instance, would massively boost food and energy production while also averting extreme weather conditions and natural disasters.
Weather patterns have changed radically and threaten the resilience our governments want to build through robust economies.
For instance, cyclones similar to those that hit Mozambique could in future easily land on East African coasts if the patterns hold because as the World Meteorological Organisation warned, no previous records show a cyclone landing as far north as Cyclone Kenneth did in April this year.
The kind of destruction left behind in Mozambique affected all sectors of its economy including food security, health systems, financial infrastructure and energy networks.
Similarly, protecting water catchment areas and preserving species habitats would do more for food security than putting more land under agriculture.
The entire world is rightly worried about the fate of bees and other pollinators. According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, pollinators support the production of 87 of the leading crops worldwide and are an integral part of 35 per cent of global agricultural lands. Take bees out of the equation and you are looking at a severely depleted food production system, and a lot more hungry and poor Africans.
The inability to ensure the health and nutrition of a population is not a good foundation for any other developmental milestone, it only leaves us poorer.
The good news is that we do not have to start from scratch to ensure that we give our natural resources the attention they need so that they in turn can take care of us. The tools and policies for this work already exist.
Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania have signed and ratified several International Conventions and Treaties, including the Convention on Biological Diversity; the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change; the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety; the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (Cites), the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands of International Importance especially as Waterfowl Habitat, and the United Nations Convention on Combating Desertification.
What governments need to do now is give their environmental departments the resources to implement these agreements and integrate them into the economic blueprint of the region.
East Africa must rightly modernise and develop with the rest of the world, and that inevitably means more infrastructure spending.
Our value proposition, however, is that investing in ecological infrastructure as well will be a key driver in achieving economic development priorities.
It is time to put our money where our natural resources are.
Otherwise the perennial issues of hunger, disease and flooding will continue to plague the region for generations to come, despite how much money we put into roads, energy and manufacturing.
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