Photo: YouTube\The New Africa Channel
In a desperate effort to have his way, dictator Yoweri Museveni accuses “The West” of “brazen double standards” towards Africa in its climate and energy policies.
The octogenarian (some say nonagenarian) potentate excused himself from the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference or Conference of the Parties of the UNFCCC, more commonly referred to as COP27, the 27th United Nations Climate Change conference, which was held from 6 November until 20 November 2022 in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt.
Instead, he penned a bizarre letter stating in part that: “Europe’s failure to meet its climate goals should not be Africa’s problem.”
Oh yes, we forgot.
“The problem of Africa in general and Uganda in particular is not the people but leaders who want to overstay in power,” Museveni once said and by staying in power in since 1986, he has surely solved that problem.
Now, he hopes to solve Uganda’s problem of climate change by ignoring all the effects of the same even as other African leaders at COP27 observed the damage climate change is already wreaking havoc on the continent.
To be sure, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in February warned that tens of millions of Africans face a future marked by drought, disease and displacement due to global heating.
Uganda, in particular, has felt these increasingly disastrous effects of climate change.
It is clear to all that extreme weather patterns are damaging the Pearl of Africa as floods, landslides, and extended drought (especially as seen in Karamoja) have hit the nation in the solar plexus.
It has been reported that 8 in every 10 Karimojong households have no or limited food, with hunger-related diseases having killed more than 900 residents since start of this year.
As a massive crop failure continues owing to drought, Gen. Museveni calls it Europe’s problem.
To make matters even more dire, landslides in the Busigu sub-region have led to the deaths of at least 1,000 persons over the past decade.
The precipitant of these deaths is climate change and it these landslides which left thousands of families displaced and homeless, too.
A couple of months ago, floods in the Eastern region occasioned by heavy rainfall not only led to deaths of 30 innocents but left 400,000 persons without access to clean water, and destroyed more than 2,000 hectares of crops.
However, Gen. Museveni callously says this is Europe’s problem, not Uganda’s or Africa’s. Which is strange because Gen. Museveni is the same person who made a big show of his commitment to the United Nations’ Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol.
Museveni’s junta even went further to ostensibly integrate climate change interventions in its Vision 2040 and five-year National Development Plan (Ministry of Water and Environment, 2015; Ministry of Finance, Planning and Economic Development, 2018).
Now we know that this was just window dressing. Or, more to the point, a trick by his junta to get its sticky fingers on part of the pledged $100 billion a year from 2020 made by the West to developing nations to help their economies adapt to challenges of climate change.
When this money came in less amounts than what Gen. Museveni had anticipated, he threw a tantrum and decided to blackmail the West and hold to ransom the rest of Africa.
Gen. Museveni needs this money to buy off opponents, murder adversaries and generally oil his vast patronage apparatus.
Hence the West can expect more grandstanding and temper-tantrums from the autocrat Museveni until he gets his paws on the money he believes is owed him, in truly extortionate fashion.
It is either that or Gen. Museveni will look to oil in order to preserve his Ancien Régime and further destroy the environment long enough for the sequel of Idi Amin, Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba, to replace him and thereby wreak hell.
