Most African countries have their feet in the water, nature having been more generous than usual this year. Opening its floodgates excessively, the sky poured an enormous quantity of water onto the continent which did not fail to cause flooding, from Lagos to Abidjan, passing through Niamey and Ouagadougou, to name only these large cities. Loss of human life, collapse of residential houses and administrative infrastructure, subsidence of roads, etc.
This is so much damage due to the overflow of water which has flowed, not under, but over the bridges, cutting off entire localities and regions from each other and destroying immense expanses of fields sown or ready for the harvest.
All of which has thus accentuated the threat of famine which was looming on the horizon in several parts of the continent for various causes. If in the Horn of Africa the great drought has mortgaged agricultural forecasts, in the Sahel it is the deadly attacks of unidentified armed men [ou “Hani”, périphrase utilisée pour qualifier les membres des groupes terroristes] and terrorist groups that make food sufficiency impossible.
Panorama of a widespread disaster
And when the fury of the waters gets involved, the skein becomes even more inextricable, and therefore impossible to unravel, rendering hopeless for the populations an existence marked with the seal of endemic poverty.
While in Nigeria it is more than half a million people who suffer from the floods which leave behind them tears and desolation, in Niger the situation, without being dramatic everywhere, is no less worrying. From mid-July to the end of August, the heavy rains that defied all the laws of the weather caused more than 80 deaths, in drownings or the collapse of houses. The figures highlight the distress of 38 departments, 89 municipalities and 538 villages, for more than 12,000 houses collapsed, 14,000 tonnes of food taken away and 100,000 people affected.
Africa drowned by Western pollution
The phenomenon is becoming practically cyclical, due to several factors, including the settlement of populations in areas at risk, reinforced by the harmful effects of climate change, of which Africa is a victim while the greatest destroyers of the ozone layer are China, the United States, Russia and other European states.
Once again, the black continent is bearing the brunt of the mad rush to industrialization in which the biggest polluters on the planet have embarked. Meanwhile, the various world meetings pompously baptized “COP” or “climate summits” follow one another and resemble each other in the myriad of decisions from which they give birth but which are struggling to be implemented.
However, as long as these so-called powerful nations do not tune in to save the “common house”, not only will current generations remain subscribed to devastating forest fires and no less catastrophic floods, but future generations will simply experience hell on earth.
Because words will never overcome the evils as long as the important and courageous actions do not follow these decisions piled up in the reports of these thousand and one summits.
More than ever, the COP27 expected in November in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, and before this meeting that of the African Climate Week, in Gabon, must constitute decisive stages for the world.
But it is Africa that must raise the tone even more, it which with its small 17% of the world population emits only, according to statistics, 3% of the greenhouse gases of the planet.
In the meantime, the water that is said to be life becomes death, in the tropics!