A Recycled School Bag for Africa's Children. Full Stop or Question Mark?

Who is behind this move? 
Where does their 'discarded' plastic come from? 
Is it really recycled? Or it's brand new plastic being touted as recycled? 
What schools are benefiting? How many students will they like to help/are helping? 
Is it free or subsidized or being sold at competitive prices? 
What is the target number to be produced, in what timeframe, and by whom are the bags being produced? Are they collaborating with any entity already making the same effort? 
Any website or space with information and contacts?

Why I have still not posted about World Environment Day

Yes, indeed.

Tuesday 5th June
It’s 4am. Accra. I got out of bed to get ready for work as usual, and seconds after, the entire neighbourhood went pitch-black. The lights are off. Electricity is out. Black-out. In my head, I can see 10,000 people in the neighbourhood shrug their shoulders and say to themselves “What’s new?” This situation is as common as small change in our part of the world. 

In this same vision, I can see them grab a candle and matchsticks OR a kerosene lantern OR a battery-operated torchlight OR a rechargeable lantern of sorts OR power on their diesel/petrol generators. A few will even have the greater luxury of turning on their alternators and yet a smaller number would not even have had time to blink in between the black-out and their self-powering deluxe petrol/diesel generators coming alive.

Most times, I can’t help but wonder why most of Africa still has insufficient electricity, still has intermittent flow of energy, still has major problems keeping economies running and growing. We have more opportunities to make hydro-electricity, more sunshine to make solar, enough wind to charge up a storm, and more than enough biomass options to make organic, environment-friendly coal, biogas, etc for cooking and petty fuel needs. MUCH MORE THAN ANY OTHER CONTINENT. We have an abundance of natural, green resources (we are now very quickly depleting and abusing), and because our population figures compared to the spread of land is low and spacious, and there is more than enough for everyone. Why do we still have a huge problem with the one thing that can rapidly grow our economies and put money in the people’s purses – Lord knows they work so hard for a pittance.

One word. POLITICS.

I know that we’ve sold our souls to the American, European, and Chinese governments.

I know that it is because Africa has been trussed up and tossed into the laps of these “super” countries and African leaders are busy doing the strip-tease and shimmying up and down the pole, dropping it like it’s hot to the power-drunken, hysterical, drug-induced, hyena-like hoots and catcalls of the “super” plunderers and slave-drivers.

Look at this:

Candles

Matchsticks

Batteries

Torchlights

Torches

Rechargeable battery units

Lanterns

Alternators

Generators

Automatic plant-size generator-sets

Are these goods (mostly) manufactured in Africa? No.

Are they companies owned by Africa(ns)? No.

Are they bringing any profit to Africa? No.

Yet all these items and more are what Africans turn to each time the lights go off. The use of our own natural green energy sources is very miniscule because most Africans cannot afford it, and most stockers refuse to sell it in unit sizes that can be afforded by the average bloke. And then again, those who can afford it are busy using generators. Why?

Because those selling the solar are mostly non-African companies. They have been instructed to market mostly non-green products to us.

Because most of the banks on this continent are non-African owned. They will not grant us funding to develop or grow our green industry and energy sources – it is the one answer to our economic success as a continent.

 Because most of the import companies and large merchandise shops are owned by non-Africans. They have a part in the conspiracy that ensures that we get what they decide to bring us, not what we want. And what they bring us is like all the above, geared to ensure that we keep purchasing their products, we keep relying on their products even for life-saving issues, we do not have access to energy and fuel products that can make use of our natural resources – like solar, wind turbines, biogas, etc - , and that we do not develop these aspects of our economy, because if we did, we would with all our resistance to suffering and familiarity to hard work, progress so quickly that in a few years, our natural resources, our minerals and wealth, our high IQs and brains, would make us the biggest, richest, most powerful, energy-abundant, mineral-wealth abundant continent in the entire world. WE would be in power of ourselves, and would have the most resources and deepest intelligence to automatically take control of our own affairs and invariably that of the world.

But as some of my very old folks say here, “White man’s witchcraft is real somethin.”

Every African leader has somehow fallen inside the ‘’scheming. We keep on taking the aid. We keep on flying over there for fancy lunches and tours and state visits, and forums. We keep on going to beg for grants and welcoming their investments. We keep on bending over … backwards, forwards, and all ways. Now if it were only the leaders doing this, I wouldn’t be writing this ….. but they screw us all. Not once, as many times as they like. Not by only one master, but by several. Not in one aspect, but in everything, and not for a lifetime/generation only, but for several.

It is so much like a voodoo curse placed on a bloodline. No matter what you do or where you pass, once you have a drop of that blood in you, you get a feel of that voodoo. We cannot escape it, even though it is our leaders doing this horrible thing. And we suffer most for it, even as they make bundles and bundles of money for themselves and if wise, their families.

So every time the light goes off in Ghana now, I just notch it on the wall for the Americans, the Europeans, and the Chinese… and the pension benefits of our African leaders. Here is more usage of their candles, batteries, torches, generators, alternators, and even petrol/diesel. Their livelihoods are made by the number of times our lights go off a year, and the total hours they STAY OFF. Their livelihoods are made whilst our children die in hospitals, candle-fire deaths; mothers die in labour on the delivery mats/beds in pitch-black clinics and health posts; dignified men and women come home with barely enough to feed and educate their children month end after month end, and our leaders keep shimmying up and down that pole… dropping it hot.

Its 5.12 am. The lights are still off. I have been sitting in the darkness, typing this out on an american-made notepad, in the glow of a solar torchlight assembled somewhere in the world, but at least, charged up by my African sun. Yeah, it is a start. What are you doing?

Now, to my African leaders, in the words of one of my sister-girlfriends said, “Africa does not want more aid. She wants her shit back. All of it. Now.” 

The Great Green Wall of Africa - african unity in a plant.

Postscript: On 25th September, 2011, Wangari Maathai passed away after battling ovarian cancer for some time. I was deeply hurt by this loss. I loved her, but we had never met or talked. Yet I felt like she was my mother, and in most things I did for the cause of Renewable Energy advocacy, charity, and development in my own little corner here, I subconsciously always looked up to her. It was my "Mecca" to someday go to Kenya, meet her, and work with the Green Belt Movement for just 1 day.

Ma Wangari! The last of a good, great generation is passing away!! Send to us from the spirit-land just one more like you!! And let him/her come to bear more like you! You took on the whole world, and shook it. 

POST:
Forgive me if you were expecting my promised update on our national dumpsites-transformation ... but this topic has been tossing my salad for too many days now, and my research on it is not yet done, so I just had to talk about this!

Heard about our very own Great Wall (of Africa) ?

It's green ... and great.

I like to think of it as African unity in a plant. It's gotta be ... it cuts through from Senegal to Djibouti; 15 kilometres wide and over 7,700 km long, passing through countries like Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Niger, Chad, Ethiopia, Eritrea ...Djibouti.

If you remember, in my March posting (Constant gas shortage in this age of RE techs (biogas)? What a load of crap!), I took a comic jab at the fact that Lake Chad was now a mud bowl, and that, the Sahara was "coming soon to a garden near you".

Turns out, I wasn't the only one thinking like that, or about those!

Yeeeeees .... Nigeria, Senegal and Chad are only a few of the countries desperately, and ambitiously spear-heading, and somewhat propagating this vision of planting a tree-belt across Sub-sahelian Africa, in a penultimate attempt at stopping the Westward migration of the Sahara, dead in its tracks.

But is this vision another african joke? Is it myth-alized, even before it has been able to grow roots (pun intended)? Or is it just a grand attempt that will drain lots of money, and then follow those notes down that bloody drain itself?

Just asking ...

The Great Green Wall of Africa was first suggested by the ex-Nigerian Prez Olusegun Obasanjo, in 2005, and put before the AU, but could not be developed due to lack of funds (surprise, surprise!)

It's been taken up again, with the full backing of Senegalese Prez Abdoulaye Wade (since Senegal has successfully promulgated a tree-growing, anti-desertification initiative for a number of years), who even made a presentation on it at the 2009 Copenhagen Summit on Climate Change.

It also has the anxious encouragement of Chad (who has seen such high levels of drought, heat, desertification, and the loss of one-third of its cattle-animal life in 2009 alone).

The estimated $100+ million funding was proving a problem, but just this month, the Global Environment Facility has pledged $119 million to the project.

Each country will receive their necessary share for the Green Wall (tree-belt) to be sucessfully planted and sustained in their territory. The focus is to plant indigenous, heat-resistance trees, and initiate green initiatives that will discourage any activities that will negatively affect the project.

I wish them well ... seriously. No joke. It will be a very very big thing to maintain, and they can ONLY do it, if they work together ... if they unite.

It will be amazing, to see these 11 African countries unite to fight the Sahara desert, and send it backwards until it is non-existent once more!

But I can not ... will not ... talk about tree-planting, and use keywords like Green, Tree, Planting ... without mentioning (with much awe and ground-kissing), my personal shero (female hero), Wangari Maathai.

Wangari Maathai is the embodiment of anything of this nature in Africa (and throughout the world).

She single-handedly started a fight to save the trees in Kenya, as far back as the 1980's- the Green Belt Movement, and she won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 for her work!

I would not know where to begin with her story, but it is an inspiring one, and one worth glancing at, so visit her website and read about her ... and visit the Nobel Peace Prize and dig into the archives for their piece on her, to find out why they felt she was worth the Nobel!

If nothing at all, you'll have something clever to talk about at some high-power function, one day!

Green Belt Movement : http://greenbeltmovement.org/index.php

Wangari's thoughts on what the G20 Summit on Economic Progress should strongly address: http://greenbeltmovement.org/a.php?id=481

Their blog (with videos and thought-provoking articles) : http://greenbeltmovement.org/blog/index.php

Read her books, especially, "Unbowed" when you get the chance!

Her recent article to the G20 summit, especially, made me realise that climate really, truly does tie into everything that holds the world up, or brings it crashing down ... I mean, look at what happened in Jos, Nigeria and the Northern part of same Nigeria - when Christians and Muslims clashed in bloody fights, and people were shot to death in broad daylight (in the early months of this year), and when the Fulani herdsmen attacked a town and killed people in a most brutal manner, the reason being that people of that town, had allegedly, earlier killed some of their Fulani people.

Na true ... say de whole tin be about Muslim people for Jos, forcin' Sharia law for place where dem have Christian neighbours for 40% - 50%.

(trans: It's true that the Muslim percentage residing in Jos, forcibly declared Sharia law over the entire region, although they had a fairly large number of Christians in said area as well).

Na true ... say de whole country be ruled by government, and e-be secular state, so nobody go fit jos gerrup say e-dey declare any particular religious law for der, by force!

(trans: It's true that being a secular state, and a federal government, no party/entity has the right to enforce any binding law of their own largess, or authority, without legal government passage, nor the backing of all the religions and persons of that community).

Na true too ... say the Fulani cow-boys no have right come disturb in sombody e-territory like dat, and expect that dem go throw nice party give dem, with big-big cow meat, and fine-fine women. Abi dem roam ... so make dem roam through the town, and go!

(trans: It's true that the Fulani herdsmen who brutally chopped up people in said Northern Nigeria community, were an uncharactersitically permanent nuisance for the people of the community they accused of killing their fellow nomads - logic declares that you not expect them to welcome you with a big party, bountiful feast, and gorgeous babes. Further logic states that nomads roam, and do not make themselves a familiar part of the local landscape).

But if you bother to take a closer look at the geo-environmental set-up (I just love it when they clump words like these together, damnit!!) of Jos, or Northern Nigeria, you will notice 2 things:

1. Jos has a fantastically temperate climate, that makes it a fave for tourists, wealthy persons, and any other John. The environment holds appeal, and makes it a territory worth fighting for ... a.k.a. kill your neighbours or line them up and shoot them in the heads.

2. Northern Nigeria has got some shares in the prestigious Saharan Stock Exchange ... with some of the dry, arid, sandy characteristics which caused the Fulani herdsmen to start moving further inland Nigeria, for food for their cattle, being established more and more each year.

And due to the steady progression of the Saharan conditions further into Nigeria, these nomads have had no choice but to stay a few steps ahead ... unfortunately, cattle-odour, the large horrific clumps of dung they leave in their wake, the strong smelly musk and droves of flies wafting about the nomads and their cattle, are usually not what you'd call 'affable'; nor are they exactly the kind of pheromones that would make drooling, lovey-eyed fools of the the people of said settlement.

The message was clear ... we are already struggling to survive in this environment, we don't need more people, especially people with hordes of cattle that will eat up all our greens! And in the case of Jos and the Muslims ... we too we like this place; you cannot use 'takashi' to just make it yours, you know!

(trans of takashi: cunning/sly means of acquiring the upper-hand in a situation - physically or conceptually).

What can I say? Really ... at the center of all these horrible, bloody conflicts, is territory. Yes, really!

The increased possessiveness of space, due to the shifting and worsening situations of our environments and plant-life - affecting food, water, land, and resources ... those things which always lead to war and civil unrests. And we all know that without the stability of these, all economies begin to crumble. And if/when all economies crumble, the world caves in.

Damn! Climate does dictate the economy after all!

Someone please dial Toronto, and tell the G20 ... they've gotten their heads up the wrong hole!